BunkBlog

So I decided to break the mold of simple grilled salmon (which is good, don’t get me wrong) when I saw a recipe for chipotle-glazed salmon in Cuisine Magazine. It was way too spicy for me, but I’m a spice wimp. Alex was put off by it, and Ang thought it was good but not appreciably better than salmon on a grill.

The pineapple-cilantro rice bed was good, though.

Ah, well – nothing ventured and all that. Tomorrow is a simple crockpot pot roast. No worries about problems with that one.

We’ve been playing with Celestia the past couple days, and boy is my graphics card tired.

Alex keeps wanting to look at the lava flows on Venus, and I’ve got models of the Deepspace 9 station and Babylon 5 and stuff all over the universe. This is going to be such a timesink this summer, I’m betting. Wonder if I can get it working on the TV-out for the Linux MythTV box I’ll be putting together. That would be cool – flying around space on the television, making Alex go, “ooh! Let me see the lava, Daddy!” over and over again. hehe

Pretty sure I saw JabberJenny down by the Concho today, with her family. I was a bit distracted trying to corral The Boy, as usual, but how many women in San Angelo have short dark hair with pink streaks, and a couple kids in tow? That’s my thought too. 🙂

Alex had another birthday party to go to this afternoon – grabbed a present from the cache in the closet. That is a tradition I’m going to keep up for as many years as kids will let me get away with it – we bought up a bunch of cheap toys at after-Christmas sales. Makes it really easy when one of his classmates has a party. So, this party was at the Rink; Alex has never skated before so you can imagine how much fun that was. Interior monolog: “must not laugh at him…must not laugh at him” heh

Perich has written an essay which captures some of my feelings on the absurdity of some academics pretty well. Not all, mind you – some of you folks are actually adding to the global knowledge base. Others – not so much.

bq. If you can’t include a layman in your conversation, what you’re talking about is trash. He doesn’t need to keep up with you every step of the way, but you ought to at least let him know what you’re talking about. Or why it’s important. “We’re talking about the notion of reader viewpoint in literature, and whether the reader has the same presence in a story as one of the characters.” See? Easy.

I’ve got a song stuck in my head, with the lyrics, “it’s freakin’ me out, freakin’ me out” and something about a system in my head or something similar. It’s a fairly recent song – anyone help me out? Google is not being my friend on this.

I recently ordered a Rio Karma, which the nice young Airman at the Security Office said would be just fine to bring into work, so long as I stopped off in his office and got a little orange sticker that said just that first.

So, the marvelous device arrived last night, I put about 8 gigs of music on it, and brought it to work this morning. The civilian leader of the Physical Security Office said he saw no reason it wouldn’t be allowed in. But, just to be careful, he asked a Master Sergeant that works down the hall from him, who said it’s not on his list so I can’t have it.

Well, it has no recording ability, which is prohibited in the building. It has no wireless communications ability, so that’s ok. What’s wrong with it, I ask…

It has a communications port to hook up to a computer, he replies.

I won’t.

How do I know that?

The same way you know that my coworker with the Palm Tungsten E won’t – have me sign a sworn statement and assume I’m not a shit.

Sorry.

Thank you so much for allowing me to waste 180 dollars and thanks for ensuring that everyone is working from the same set of standards. I appreciate all that you do here. Have a great day.

Everyone has prejudices. We all have certain groups of people we don’t like to interact with. My particular bias is against stupid people. Sadly, the association with military personnel affords me too many opportunities to interact with stupid people.

It’s so very frustrating living in the middle of nowhere in the digital age. I can order things online and they get delivered to my door – good thing. I can watch their movements via the UPS and Fedex website – good thing. UPS routes everything through Dallas – weird thing.

I’ve ordered a new MP3 player for work. I cannot have a device at work that records or that broadcasts, so my lust-worthy players are out. However, Rio recently discontinued the 20Gig Karma and it’s on sale at Buy and other places for under $200. The Karma has no recording ability, no FM receiver or transmitter, none of the bells and whistles that people are demanding from digital audio devices today. But, it is legal in the SCIF(Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility) so I snapped it up. It was shipped from Phoenix, to me here in West Texas. Because of the hub-and-spoke system that UPS uses, it has already passed by me once. It went from Phoenix to El Paso (West of me) to Dallas (East of me) before it gets to me hopefully tomorrow. Bizarre and frustrating.

Now I’ve got to figure out which 30% of my music I want to put on it first.

Because Kit got me interested in it, I ended up buying new sheets (440 threadcount Egyptian cotton) and pillows from Overstock this month. Ooh, are they nice. And not expensive (bonus!).

Must. keep. away. from. overstock.

Went to go see Robots today, with Alex the monkey boy. It was pretty good, recommended for any kids. Might not be a big hit with serious folks, but it was entertaining fluff, and (most importantly) the Boy liked it.

So, my secondary hard drive went tits up (SMART monitor on the motherboard says it’s hosed, and Windows says, “you have a D drive?”) Saturday, with no warning. Now, Windows won’t boot at all, even with the D drive disconnected. I have used the Ultimate Boot CD to do what I can, and copied some files from the NTFS-formatted D drive to an old FAT32-formatted drive with Knoppix (good thing I keep weird shit around, eh?).

Now, I’ve got a 20-foot ethernet cable strung across the living room to my computer so I can use Knoppix (which doesn’t recognize my POS WiFi card), so I can attempt to do some homework (darned online classes have pitfalls after all).

This is fun. And not at all paranthetical.

I’ve decided to stop inundating my site with near-daily posts of the latest in epicurian experimentation. So, here’s the weekly wrapup (didn’t say I was gonna stop sharing entirely, did I?):
French Onion Salisbury Steak with Cheesy Bread – good, but a little too tomato – we’ll try it again with less tomato.
Honey-Sesame Pork Chops – not remotely worth the effort. Smelled great, tasted ok.
Honey Mustard BBQ Chicken – too much curry in the recipe. Next time, no curry.
Chicken Cordon blee burgers – great, yummy, definitely gonna do ’em again.

So, of the four new recipes, one definite keeper and two need modifications. That’s not too bad. I also made the semi-homemade clam chowder again. I likey.

That’s what I had in my yard today. On the good side, this should take care of our recurring problems with sewage backups. We had a great tar-and-paper pipe for our sewer, which was apparently commonly used around the time of the Second World War. Our house is probably the last on the block or the city to get it replaced. Joy.

After reading We the Media a few months ago, I came to the realization that San Angelo is most definitely an “underserved” market for local news and views. Like many small cities, we have a couple local television stations (although one is currently in a fight with the major cable provider so almost nobody watches it), and we have one local newspaper. That paper, usually referred to as the SubStandard Times, is so thin on most days it can cause a paper cut with the folded edge. Sunday’s paper is almost the size of the international edition of USA Today. And yet they charge as much or more for that thing as for the Dallas newspaper, also available for local delivery. Our ABC affiliate is from Abilene. So today I read Julie Moos’s article about citizen journalism, and I’m reminded yet again that it would be so easy to set up a site, using a CMS(Content Management System) like CivicSpace to provide a place for all the local people to share information, meet virtually or arrange to meet in reality, and generally recreate the town square of a true small town in this small city.

So, what domain should I use? I’m thinking something with the Concho River in the name, since most of the “San Angelo” URLs are taken. Concho Corral? Concho Online? Hmm…

Finished my homework a day earlier than necessary, played Pirates of the Spanish Main with monkey boy, went to the park until he asked to come home, watched Donnie Darko (brilliantly weird as hell), made barbecued pork loin for all and sundry (a hit), and now off to bed with nekkid woman.

Bonus – tomorrow is a day off.

The experiment du jour was Panini. We made grilled sandwiches containing coppa, sopprasetta, tomatoes, and two kinds of cheese. It was good, definitely a keeper. And oh so difficult (make sandwich, spray with olive oil, grill for three to five minutes)!

Dessert? Why, yes there is – super rich brownies.

Tomorrow is clam chowder. I’ll keep you informed.

Today’s epicurean experiment was a cassoulet. This particular recipe called for sausage and chicken, with lima beans and the usual winter veggie stuff (mirepoix?). It got mixed reviews. The chicken was good, the lima beans perhaps overdone, and the sausage definitely overdone. If we make it again, the sausage goes in later and the beans will be dry when we put them in (crockpot meals give you such flexibility).

Finished downloading the BitTorrent of Eyes on the Prize this weekend, and just got around to looking at moving it to a DVD to watch on TV. I guess I should make that two DVDs – it’s over three hours long. Wow.

The genesis of the recent civil uprising against copyright law is interesting to me; too bad it hasn’t made any impact at all on the wholly owned subsidiary of the entertainment industry we call the U.S. Congress. Why in the world does it make sense for a movie to be considered legitimate for 20 years, and then suddenly it’s breaking the law? What twisted mentality takes “the most important civil rights film” and turns it into something that school children are not allowed to view without someone bootlegging it? It’s messed up.

Recently, a group of civil rights leaders posted an open letter supporting this civil disobedience masquerading as piracy. I find it disheartening that the estate of Martin Luther King, Jr is among those who object to distributing this movie. Way to honor his memory, guys.

Free your mind.

So, with the one gigabyte Memory Stick in my Clie, I’ve finally gotten around to ripping some DVD video to it. So far, just a Looney Tunes short, “One Froggy Evening,” but next is one of Alex’s movies. Something about Dino Thunder Thunder White Thunder Ranger Thunder Power Thunder I think.

Meanwhile, I’ve decided that a PVR(Personal Video Recorder) would be a cool thing to have, but hearing the stories about the studios reaching into machines and turning off features, I’m a bit wary of the commercial Tivo and MCE products. Then, Tivo starts adding commercials when you’re trying to skip them…

So, I’m putting together plans for a MythTV based recorder once I graduate this spring. Figure nobody gives a 34 year-old graduation presents, so I’ll get ’em for myself. 🙂

So, at work today, I got into a fistfight with one of the GIs. I think I may not work there any more. They don’t generally like people beating on the customer, I think.

Then, I get home and find a note from my wife, telling me she left me for an insanely butch woman she met last week. WTF is that about?

Ya know

Remember, LJ Rabbit Hole Day is tomorrow, the 27th of January. In case you normally make sense on your blog, tomorrow you are not supposed to.

Be surreal.