How to Make 1-Minute Breakfast Muffins

We've recently started eating low-carb, after reading the astonishingly large amount of studies that show how many negative health conditions can be eliminated by removing carbs from one's diet.

Since any kind of cold-turkey dietary sacrifice is enough of a mental shock on its own, giving up half the things you eat can be a little mind-numbing during the first few months. And on any low-carb diet, breads and pastries are among the first to go.

So we found this recipe for a low-carb breakfast muffin, that's ridiculously easy to make and surprisingly filling. Here is my how-to video.

In case you can't see it, here's the recipe:

 - 1/4 Cup Flax Seed
 - 1/2 tsp. Baking Powder
 - 2 tsp. Cinnamon
 - about 1 tsp. Butter
 - about 1 tsp. Sugar or Sweetener
 - 1 Egg

Mix dry ingredients in a medium-sized coffee mug. Mix in butter with a fork until it's a consistent...consistency(?). Mix in the egg. Microwave for one minute. Garnish with the topping of your choice.

Some of my YouTube viewers have already taken the recipe into their own hands and started making substitutions that better suit their diets, but the concept remains the same. It's quick, it's portable, and it's a single-serving recipe that's good for on-the-go mornings or midnight snacks.


Bon Appétit!
-R.

Staying Focused

Hello again.

I haven't blogged since April. If I actually had a following, that'd be a problem. I've got so many new ideas and things I've learned, I've got enough to blog about for a good while now. I guess I just needed to take some time off to figure some things out.

But here we are.

I've learned that we as human beings are capable of doing incredible things, if we just focus our energy into making those things actually happen. In the same way, lack of focus leads to missed opportunities, mistakes, lapses in discernment, and aimless wandering.

It's not enough to just set a goal; you must constantly remind yourself of what that goal is and why it's so important. If your goal is not worth daily re-discipline, it's not worth meeting in the first place.

We normally manage to put away a few hundred a month for savings, but when I checked the totals for October, I found that the best possible scenario (other than me getting a raise or the apartment complex calling us and telling us we just don't have to pay rent anymore) involves stashing away upwards of $2,500 in the month of October alone.

I really want this to happen.

But again, it's not going to happen if I don't focus on this outcome each and every day. So, I used the calculator app on my phone to total up the maximum possible amount of savings we could possibly squeeze out of October, and I took a screenshot of that total.

Now, my lock screen is that screenshot. Every time I use my phone, I see that number in large numerals spread across my screen.

I use my phone a lot.

We'll see how it goes. Also, I just found out that my wife has a secret cash stash. So that will help.

This is all for now.

-R.

PS: It's good to be back.

Laid to Rest

My most recent short film runs just over 3 minutes, and is more of an exercise in artistic style than an actual narrative film.  I originally posted it as an unlisted video on YouTube, but was recently told by a very prominent filmmaker that I should let it go public to help get my work out there.  So here it is.

Comments welcome, as always.  I think this summer I might add more to this.

This is all for now.
-R.

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Nothing Left Unsaid

I went through a Ronnie Day phase which lasted just long enough for me to ensure that I would never forget the lyrics to any of his songs.  Which are all contained in his one and only album to date.  One of my assignments for Digital Design was to create an album cover in Illustrator, so I created what I imagined his follow-up album to be:

But, as always, my art is always a reflection of the life stage I'm at when I create it.  We started watching a show called "V," in which aliens visit earth and start this peaceful campaign to merge both species and culture for the betterment of both.  But actually they're here to destroy us, as they always are.  It's well written, because within the first two episodes, you've got an array of characters, each with their own mini-stories and their own generic conflicts:

• The FBI agent who learns the truth about the aliens' diabolical plot while her son decides to join ranks with them.
• The priest who struggles to help his congregation keep the faith while he inwardly questions the existence of God.
• The alien rebel who sets out to fight the aliens off, while keeping it from his human fiancée and putting her in danger.
• The journalist, whom the aliens put in the sticky situation of deciding whether to do his job or elevate his career.

The list goes on.  The reason this is good writing is because they have made an earnest (and pretty successful) effort to ensure that every audience member will be able to relate to at least one of their characters.  Parents who want to protect their children, career-driven professionals, religious practitioners, renegade underdogs, earth-hating reptiles, etc.

The reason we are captivated by this kind of storytelling is because each of us carries within us our own collection of characters.  People call them masks, hats, alter egos...I call them reflections.  My artist friends see my creative self, my intellectual friends see my brainy self, and my co-workers see my lazy self.  I mean, my awesome driven efficient go-getter self.

I've been learning some simple yet profound tidbits of wisdom from the oddest places lately.  My most recent life lesson has been that every new thing learned is an old excuse lost.  But that will probably become it's own article.  The other thing I'm learning is to live a life where nothing is left unsaid.  It is instinctive to show different faces to different people, depending on the nature of your relationship to them.

One of my closest intellectual friends said to me this weekend, "I wish I had a better eye for the artistic beauty of things."  The thought occurred to me right then and there that in the past 25 years, I can't remember the last time I had spoken to him about the beauty I see in the world - about the small aesthetic experiences that make life beautiful.  Maybe if I had switched gears and shown him that side of me, he would  be more in tune with the aesthetic beauty of every day life.

What I'm getting at is that if you only ever talk cars with your car friends and music with your music friends and movies with your movie friends, you are choosing to pass up an incredible opportunity to see people grow in new directions because of you.  Few things are more sobering than the stark realization that most of your relationships are one-dimensional.

Say things you wouldn't normally say to people you wouldn't normally say them to.  Show all of you to all of them.  Let nothing go unsaid, and see what happens to the way you interface with the world.  Take this as an invitation, a challenge, an answer, or a tiny quote printed on the bottom half of today's page in that desk calendar that's only really good for tearing out the pages and folding them into paper airplanes.  However you take this, expect me to start living like this.  Check back to see how it goes, because I really have no idea what to expect.

This is all for now,
-R.

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Apps That Don't Suck

When I bought my first iPhone, I pretty much spent every waking moment surfing the App Store, downloading every app that may come in handy one day.  After filling about a dozen pages with pointless games, oddly specific utilities, addictive social networking tools and other tidbits of randomness that I now look back on and wonder why anyone would actually take time out of their lives to write, I realized that I could live without most of them.  Okay, all of them.

Every now and then, I still do pop out onto the monstrous cash cow that is the Apple App Store, just to see if there's anything that may make my life a little more entertaining and/or easier to manage.  Everyone already knows about the heavy hitters like Facebook, Shazam, Pandora, WootWatch, and all those stupid games that get way more attention than they deserve, like that one with the slingshot and the birds.  ...I forget the name.

But then there are those rare finds that don't ever make it to the front page - diamonds in the rough that would be more popular than Plants Vs. Zombies if people just knew they existed.

App Shopper

When I first got the phone, I resolved never to pay for an app, because I knew that otherwise I would quickly have an apple-shaped hole in my pocket the size of the grand canyon.  My saving grace is that occasionally the paid apps go free for holidays or promotional events.  When they do, the App Shopper is there to scoop them up and put them in a convenient App Store-style list for you to download.  A must-have for anyone who doesn't like paying for apps.

HeyTell

It's like talking on the phone without calling anyone.  It's like texting, but you use your voice instead of displayed text.  It's like a walkie-talkie, but...not.  Basically, you record a short voice message and HeyTell wisps it away to the recipient of your choosing, and they in turn can send you a voice message in response.  It's like leaving a voicemail without having to call them first.  It also saves conversations so that you can play them back.  I'm not sure what that's useful for, but it's still pretty groovy.

VoiceBreif

We've all seen it in one form or another: the "home of tomorrow," showcasing an all-encompassing information center that reads your feeds while you get ready for the day.  News, stocks, weather, social media updates, traffic, sports scores, the whole nine.  VoiceBreif is definitely a step in that direction.  It's not all the way there, but it definitely makes my mornings that much better.  Definitely.

The Dark Nebula Series

Rarely do I find a game in the App Store that entertains me for more than a few hours.  By now, it's almost a reflex to delete a newly downloaded game after a 5-minute test drive.  With Dark Nebula, however, I couldn't stop playing, and I eagerly await the third episode.  I think I might punch a baby if I find out they've stopped making them.

Flashlight

Ever since the iPhone 4 came out with the LED flash, dozens of apps poured onto the scene, designed solely to turn the phone into a flashlight.  Most of them have splash screens or use the camera API, and take several seconds to actually turn on the light.  That may sound like a short period of time, but there are several situations in which one might need a flashlight, where immediacy is paramount.  This app is as close to instant light as I can find.

Tilt to Live

The Tilt to Live premise is brilliantly simple: the white arrow is controlled by tilting the device; red dots continuously pop up and float toward the arrow.  If the arrow makes contact with a dot, and the game is over.  Power-ups give you different dot-destroying abilities, and before you know it, you've been sitting on the toilet for over an hour trying to beat your 3-million high score and your legs are asleep.  Great soundtrack, too.

CrazyAlarm

Of all the alarm clock apps on the market, this one does the best at waking you up.  Mostly because the sounds are intentionally obnoxious and you have to shake your phone over 100 times to turn off the alarm.  It's very hard to not be wide awake after repeatedly hearing Robin Williams scream "Goooood morning Vietnam!" while you shake your phone like a zombified psychopath.  Plus, it's free.

All you iPhone users out there should check these out.  And if you have any apps that you just can't live without, share the wealth and post 'em in a comment.

This is all for now.

-R.

Related articles

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This is my Homework

This is my homework.

My favorite part of this photo montage is that all the raw footage was taken with our new DSLR.  It's incredible how much I learned about Photoshop even in just the first two weeks of class.  I've gone back to re-read one of my favorite books, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, to keep the concepts therein fresh on my mind as I move through this semester.  In spite of everything I knew about Photoshop over the past decade or so, my Digital Design professor is still finding ways to make me feel like a beginner.

There is a Taoist saying that reads:

The man who can renovate himself for just one day:

That same man has the capacity for daily renovation.

I created this blog as a repository for all the off-the-wall ideas and concepts birthed by the unorthodox way I interface with the world.  The slogan I coined, "one man's ignorance is another man's bliss" is a play on the old adage, "one man's trash is another man's treasure."  It speaks to the idea in 1 Corinthians 1:25 - something to the effect of "God's foolishness is wider than man's wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than man's strength."  Basically, I'm placing myself in the position of the fool who follows behind the wise, collecting the discarded scraps of insight that they leave behind as they walk their paths.

Thus the name, "A Fool's Gold."

I don't think I've ever explained that.

I'm learning how to let my mind be creative so that I don't have to.  Whenever a problem presents itself, I simply acknowledge and accept the problem, take a second to commit it to my subconscious memory and let it percolate for a few days.  Then one day as I go about my daily tasks, the answer jumps out at me like all those annoying pop-up windows we hated so much in the late 90's.

Well, the other day, I was smacked in the face with one such idea.  I realized that midway through February, I started slacking on the whole "living life in HD" thing.  Seeing as how I was hoping to spend the entire year improving in humility and discipline, I've been seeing this as a 87.5% failure.  I should have seen it as a 12.5% success.  The answer that hit me like a ton of marshmallows* was simply this: set twelve one-month goals instead of one big, vague sweeping New Years resolution.

So, around this time every month, I'm going to start pontificating on what my goal for the next month should be.  Since I realized this halfway through the month, my goal for the rest of February has been to get myself onto a regular schedule to keep dishes, laundry, trash and litter box taken care of.  That hasn't been that hard, since I've pretty much already been doing that.  I have a few ideas about my March goal, but I need to spend more time in prayer about it.

To tie this all together, I've had plenty of opportunity to stoke the fire of self renovation, and I've been squandering it.  So, come March, I'm getting serious about getting serious.  ...again.

We'll see.  I've also been spending just about every car trip recording (upwards of 10 hours of) my thoughts into my iPhone.  Expect to see a separate blog page dedicated solely to the [uncensored] transcriptions of these recordings.

This is all for now.
-R.

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*It came out of nowhere and I was slightly confused at first, but then became very glad it happened.

These are my officemates

These are my officemates.

It's this sculpture of these two old dudes in a horseless carriage.  They just sit there day in and day out, just as happy and carefree as they were the day before.  I often look at them and wonder who they would become if I had the key from The Indian in the Cupboard.  We got a new camera because we had to.  And by "camera" I mean Canon EOS Rebel T2i.  And by "we had to," I mean it was recommended in the syllabus to my Digital Design course at UTA.  Which I start tomorrow.

God told me that I was going to spend this year learning humility and discipline.  I've been entertaining the idea of calling it "living life in HD."  I have a sinking feeling that I know how he intends to teach me those two things, and if I'm right, it'll be a severe case of killing two birds with one stone.  Or more like a flock of birds.

In the Spirit of Humility

I have gotten to the point where I'm okay with not saying something.  More often than not, I honestly believe that what I have to say will benefit the recipient of my words, or provide meaningful input to the conversation at hand.  I'm learning, though, that humility is not found in the process of changing this mindset; instead, it's the decision to hold my tongue in spite of it.  It doesn't matter how deep my thoughts or how insightful my perspective - if I'm talking, that means I'm not listening, and thus actively making the decision to pass up an opportunity to learn something.

Be of exceedingly humble spirit,

for the end of a person is the worm.

In the Spirit of Discipline

I've managed to drag myself kicking and screaming into a regimented daily and nightly routine, which I created  on the principles of balance.  I found that my mornings were too heavy and my nights were too light, so I started making my (and Glennda's) lunch each night for the following day.  But even beyond the whole routine thing, I've taken it to the world of daily and weekly tasks that I have convinced myself that I simply must do.  I've put a white board on the wall of my room, so that every Sunday night I can map out every task that needs accomplishing the following week, and resolve to get them done.  But still, none of this is demonstrative of discipline.  It's easy to keep anything up for seventeen days.  The discipline element will really come into play when it's not new and exciting anymore.  When it's April or July or September and I don't feel like making tomorrow's lunch at 11:30 pm.

The one who conquers others has physical strength;

The one who conquers one's self is strong.

It all comes down to August.  If I find myself entering the month of August this year and still have my weekly task map, if I'm still reading a couple books a week, if I continue to pursue a humble attitude and a beginner's mind, if I still make my lunches every night, if there's a noticeable change in my speech and the way I relate to other people - then I will be able to look back and say that I have begun to learn discipline.  Of course, there are other ways to learn discipline . . . other more crash-course-ish ways.

I'm hoping to learn my way.

We'll see.

This is all for now.

-R.

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These are my books.

These are my books.

My boss bought them for me.  He decides I need to learn something, so he buys me a book about it.  These are all the books he's bought me since I started in September of last year.  That's about a book a month, which is quite an accomplishment, considering the thickness of the books and the fact that I'm a ridiculously slow reader.

This time last year, I was all about reinventing myself.  I had my new creed (which I still live by), and I had concrete expectations for what the following 52 weeks would look like.  Around February I started realizing just how hard that creed was to live by; by June I'd stopped taking my daily pictures for Project 365, and in August I was faced with the startling realization that I hadn't really learned anything or grown at all that year.

Well, it's round 2 and I feel like I'm being catapulted into 2011 with tons of momentum and more ammunition than I know what to do with.

I'm plowing through a book that is giving me a fresh set of eyes for studying the Word.

I'm in the process of shifting to a new paradigm that will allow me to absorb insane amounts of written information in minutes.

I'm forcing myself to be okay with waking up insanely early to make time for things that are (or should be) important.

I'm going through a process of re-learning everything I (think I) already know, and keeping a beginner's mind about everything.

I am learning how to view the world with a "soft focus," which widens my field of view and allows me to be more alert to my physical surroundings.

I am studying how to be more in-tune to the needs of my wife.

Last year I took this so seriously that I ran it into the ground.  One common element I'm finding in all of these new concepts is a playful sense of curiosity.  This is truly where exploration meets revelation.

So am I going to totally reinvent myself and try to become the best version of myself possible?  No.  I'm going to learn to practice humility and discipline and reconnect with my Father.

This is all for now.
-R

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This is my Rubik's cube.

This is my Rubik's Cube.

I've known how to solve these things for over a decade now. My dad showed me how to solve it using 5 moves, ranging from 4 to 16 turns. Each of these 5 moves can be used as tools to put the pieces where you want, in a 3-phase system from start to finish. But being able to complete these three phases requires a knowledge of how the cube is built and how it was designed to move.

Although I am still able to impress people by my ability to solve it, I myself have grown bored with this method and have started developing a new way of thinking about it. See, I will never be able to use this method to complete a cube in 20 seconds. There are too many steps. As I study the cube and the way the pieces move across the 3 axes, I find new ways to do the things I already do, but in a significantly reduced number of turns.

The key is to think of the entire cube all the time, rather than the two or three pieces I'm dealing with at any one moment. This doesn't mean to memorize where everything is all the time. What this mindset does is afford me the freedom to combine the functions of the moves I already know, without having to go through every single step.

When I think in terms of the entire cube, I am able to create new moves that are specific to the current state of the cube. Furthermore, if I pay close enough attention, I can engineer my current move to set up the cube for my next move. In time and with practice, what will eventually happen is that the entire process will be one giant improvised move. This is how people look at the cube for 15 seconds, then solve it in 20. They don't have a vocabulary of set-in-stone combinations that they use at different points in the process - the entire solution is one huge combination.

I'm trying to learn how to live life like this. To learn how to treat my relationships like this. To look into the systems that we mere mortals have put in place, and see the underlying elements that make them what they are and understand why they function the way they do. It's looking at a person and seeing the world they live in. It's looking at a system or mechanism and asking "why." Because just like with the Rubik's Cube, I can't change my way of thinking until I gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the cube itself. Can I solve it? Yeah. But could I solve it more efficiently? You bet. It just takes determination, time, and paradigm shifts.

I think I read that somewhere...

This is all for now.
-R.

UPDATE:
I was lying in bed at about 3:30 this morning staring at the ceiling, and it came to me: the best way to explain this new mindset I'm trying to adopt.  It's the difference between a local and an out-of-towner, with regards to driving.  If someone from another state visits Dallas, I can give them directions from point A to point B.  They'll know that one route, and if they stay long enough, they'll start to memorize it and learn other routes.  But some people choose to limit themselves to memorizing routes.  Then there are locals who have lived in the city their entire lives.  They've got a map of the city burned into their brains.  These people can come up with new routes - routes with shortcuts, scenic routes, routes that avoid freeways - because they just know the roads.  I want to have the "mind of a local" when it comes to the Cube.  Actually, when it comes to everything.

'NOTHER UPDATE:
I've been playing with the Cube every day at work this week, between tasks or whenever I needed to get my mental juices flowing.  I've been counting my moves and timing myself, and when I averaged everything out, I've been pretty consistent about finishing it in 2:30 minutes and using (an average of) 75 turns per solve.  This is using my new system where I apply the "mind of a local" to the whole cube.  I solved it a few times using my old system, and the averages were about 4 minutes and a couple hundred turns.

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This is my final.

This is my final.

This semester, I've really been struggling to get back to where I was when I had a tight rein on my day-to-day routine, my habits, and all the things I was interested in incorporating into my lifestyle.  I've gotten to a point where I realize what I need to do to get back to that place.  This was my final project for my drawing class.  I completed it in 3 hours, as opposed to the 18+ hours it would take me to do similar drawings a few months ago.  I really think it captures where I'm at in life right now.

I've been meditating for about an hour a day these past few months, and have started to have some pretty interesting revelations.

The Macroverse

Everyone I've met in my life lives in their own world.  Some worlds overlap, sometimes completely.  I live in my own world.  Yet I see a bigger picture in which all these worlds coexist, connected to one another to create a giant web of life and experience.  I call this big picture the Macroverse.  Each of these worlds exists as both a cloud and a node, containing a nebulous collection of common experiences and ideals, shared among its members, yet serving as a point of intersection between the pathways that link these worlds.  Many worlds are strongly connected to one another, some are faintly connected, and others are completely disconnected.  Lately I've been learning to not only see the worlds people live in, but where those worlds fit into the Macroverse, and how they influence it.  Often, when people are discontent about who they are and where they are in life, what they really have their eye on is another world in the Macroverse, and they just don't know how to get there.  It's simply a matter of showing them the path that links the two worlds.

The Voidness

When I peer into myself and am asked what I see, it's very much like peering at a sample through a microscope with an ever-increasing focus.  On the surface are my actions.  This is what people see with the naked eye, that determines who I am in their world.  For everyone who actively perceives me, a slightly altered version of me exists in their world.  Therefore, I have as many alternate selves as I have relationships.  On the cellular level, I find the ideas that govern my actions.  On a molecular level are my beliefs that shape my ideas, and on the atomic level are my experiences that form the beliefs that govern the ideas that determine my actions, which in turn create more experiences.  But between the nuclei and electrons of the experiences that make up the person I've become, there exists the Voidness.  This is the space between the space.  It's who I am when you strip me of my beliefs, my experiences, my thoughts, ideals, morals, opinions, habits, goals and actions.  This innermost part of myself is both the most beautiful and the most terrifying part of my being.  There, I see my true self peering back, and my world is suddenly saturated with the realization that I am being introduced for the first time to this pair of intensely focused eyes whose obsidian gaze has waited 24 years to be met.

The Triune Law

There are three sets of laws in existence: Human Law, Natural Law, and Supernatural Law.  I'm still discovering what each of these entails, but what I do know is that everyone has a veritable pie chart in their mind that reflects how much weight each of these laws carries in their life.  These three schools of Law do not carry equal weight in the universe.  Those who subscribe to the Supernatural Law have been known to break not only Human Law but Natural Law as well.  There are those who would follow Natural Law and in doing so can escape Human Law, but not Spiritual Law.  Those who desire only Human Law live in the smallest of worlds, as they necessarily must follow the other two, to exist in this universe; they are often completely unaware of the existence of Supernatural Law.  The primary school of Law a person follows can be determined through several factors, including the density of meaningful content in their speech, the motivation behind their actions, and the subject of both their attention and intention.  The Law each person seeks to follow directly influences the world in which they live in the Macroverse.

I had to write this down before I forgot it.

More to come as more is revealed.

-R.