BunkBlog

Although I consider myself a West Coast guy, somehow I’ve always made and most appreciated East Coast style, thick hearty flame-grilled burgers.  These meat bombs require a little attention to ensure they get seared on the outside yet don’t have a cold uncooked center – a combination of direct and indirect heat and a lot of watching.  Patience is a virtue.

I recently came across the Burger Lab on Serious Eats, and was inspired to duplicate Kenji’s Double-Double clone.  Tonight was burger night. I’ve got to say, I’ve never made such THIN burgers before. It’s a different approach, requiring not patience but a quick spatula. I’m sure they could have burned very easily. I put together some blanched and double-fried potatoes to go with the burgers, and we ate them so quickly there is no photographic evidence – sorry.

We learned very quickly the reason for the paper wrappers at In-N-Out; those things want to disintegrate and drip all over the place.  Kat and Alex agreed that they were amazingly yummy and almost replace going to In-N-Out. The dogs wanted to know why we don’t make them burgers and fries.

I highly recommend reading through some of Kenji’s posts – that man is obsessive about his food, particularly burgers.

My first draft of the San Angelo State Park trails, in KML format.  Open in Google Maps or Google Earth – it is nifty.  All ready for some autumn hiking and geocaching with my baby.

I’ve been playing Burnout Paradise on my computer (the old one and the seemingly cursed new one) since August 6th.  As of last week, the game started giving me an error that I couldn’t buy any downloadable content, due to one of four possible reasons:

1. I was too young.
2. My account was not allowed to purchase content.
3. The content was not yet released.
4. I was not signed in to my account.

So far as I could tell, none of those things applied.  I’m certainly above the age where I need permission to purchase anything, I was signed in and the content was not only released a year ago, I’d seen it offered for my purchase just last month.  I certainly hadn’t blocked myself from purchasing anything, but I also could find no information about that in my account one way or the other.

After 3 days of email, and one 40 minute chat, here are the tasks which I’ve been asked to accomplish under EA’s direction, while telling them at every step that my ACCOUNT must be borked on their end and maybe there’s a setting in there which they could check:

• Clear the cache of my internet browser.  Since they couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me which browser engine is used for the in-game store, I cleared ALL of my caches in all 3 browsers (and both the 32- and 64-bit versions of IE).
• Buy content from the Playstation store. Neat trick for a PC game.
• Delete everything from my Windows temp directory. Sure, whatever.
• Kill every process running on my machine other than Explorer and Taskmgr that weren’t owned by System. Right, let me kill 90 processes – some essential – just for fun.
• Open 50 different ports in my firewall. Sure, whatever.
• Uninstall and reinstall the game, erasing all traces from the registry as well.  That took a while.
• Log in to the game. Duh?

Not only are some of those things bad ideas, some are even impossible or ludicrous.  If I killed every process owned by me that wasn’t Explorer, I’d effectively kill the browser I was using to communicate in the chat, as well as destabilizing my audio, video, and other hardware that has helper software.  Buying content from the Playstation store for my Windows game seems bizarre in the utmost.  I did uninstall and clear all registry bits and reinstall, as that MAY have been of some use.  I also cleared my caches, although the utility of that option still escapes me.

Naturally, after all this time and effort, including re-downloading a 3 gigabyte file, the game still won’t allow me to purchase any DLC.  I’m not even really planning to buy anything right now, I just figured after three days of seeing an error which I hadn’t seen the previous three weeks, there must be something WRONG that might need seein’ to.  This morning, they finally elevated this to second-level tech support.  WTF?  You would think my telling them that purchasing Playstation content for my Windows machine was ludicrous would cause them to elevate it, but no.  What finally put it over the top is when, on email #10 or so, the tech dork actually said I had to log in with my email address to access the game.  This is after I’d told them many times that the GAME was fine, the online-gaming portion was fine, the in-game browser was fine, it was just the in-game store which was broken, and gave an error indicating an ACCOUNT problem.  Finally, after that email where I told them they were ridiculous for thinking that I’d somehow logged in with someone else’s email address (which the game won’t allow and the game doesn’t use email addresses anyway), they finally said, “Oh, let me elevate this.”

I think the takeaway from this experience is, “If you buy an EA game, hope you never have problems.”

So, think there may be something amiss with my computer?

There are several computing devices in my house, ranging from a Nokia N770 to a 2006-vintage eMachines to a netbook to a DVR to this monster machine I put together.  This is by far the least reliable and most powerful of the lot.  Rather distressing, really.

I found it disturbing when people would defend some of our mistakes in Iraq by claiming we were better than Saddam, as if our goal was merely to be somewhat less evil than an authoritarian dictator who gassed his own people and ran rape rooms in his torture prison.  It appears the Democrats are using a similar strategy going into November: at least we’re not as bad as the GOP, right?

When DNC chair Tim Kaine was on the Daily Show a week or two back, Jon Stewart rightly lambasted him for the absurdity of their “Don’t give them the keys” approach.  Kaine had no real retort other than the tired statements of GOP perfidy.  Sure, the GOP did a lot of stupid venal petty shit during their years in power.  So, Dems, what are you doing different? They don’t seem to have a very compelling argument in their favor.

I could list all the ways in which I’m disappointed in the current administration and the Democrats in Congress, but Glenn Greenwald has a great piece today which has many nice links and great points to make.  Unlike some of his articles, this one is not biased against the GOP.  Greenwald is very clearly documenting the failures of the Democratic party, and even if you’re happy to see the Dems fail, it’s interesting to see in one place all the many ways in which they are using fearmongering and low expectations to try to hold onto power (power they haven’t really taken advantage of while they had it).

Change you can…definitely not see.

The jeep was out of the Army inventory before I enlisted (I saw lots of CUCV and HMMWV and tracks and the occasional deuce and a half or five-ton), but they were legendary for their ease of repair.  These guys make it look incredibly easy to rip one apart and put it back together, in less than four minutes.  I think they’ve practiced.

In case there’s any doubt that the terrorists have “won” the war for hearts and minds, here we have a bomb squad blowing up a “suspicious” $300 toy pony.

Yep, we’ve given up and are now paranoid police state wackjobs.

This squirrel has to be the most determined critter ever.  LET GO!

I love this comic.  Anyone who has ever had to deal with grammar nuts complaining about prepositions and split infinitives, when those are bizarre latinate rules applied to a germanic language should be able to relate.

I haven’t built a new computer since January 2006, when I put together my MythTV box. I haven’t bought a new computer for myself since March 2007, when I bought a refurbished eMachines T6536. Since then, I’ve upgraded both of those boxes, with the eMachines ending up with two additional hard drives for a total of one terabyte of storage, an Nvidia GT220 video card and a PSU to handle it.  All that and it still only gets 67296 on the Crystalmark benchmark.

I just finished putting together a new machine, with parts purchased over the past 8 months or so. With a quad-core Athlon 635, 4 gigs of PC1333 RAM, Radeon 5770 video card, and two 500 gigabyte hard drives, it gets 186731 on the Crystalmark test. Sweet.

Now, to take on the crazy people in Burnout!

Because the only significant story in the tech press today is about Apple (as is true every time Steve Jobs gets on a stage), I have become far too aware of the various iPod and iPad updates announced.  I find it interesting that Apple chose to replace the most popular model, the nano, with a version completely unlike the one which sold so well – it now has a touch screen and no buttons. Since the iPod classic was not mentioned, one assumes it is being led out behind the barn for an Old Yeller moment.  That leaves the iPod Shuffle as the sole remaining iPod with buttons.  Apple has decided that you can either have buttons or a screen, but not both.

I personally use my Sansa Fuze in the car, and the tactility of the physical buttons is the only thing which allows me to jump past a song while keeping my eyes on the road.  I’ve heard that people who listen to their music while exercising are also quite fond of physical buttons.  Would those people now have to resign themselves to the screenless shuffle (4 gigs of music without a screen? Ick) or does Apple just not care if some portion of their market jumps to a Samsung or Sansa or Creative player instead?

Of course, this assumes that Apple purchasers are sane humans who weigh the balance of features they need and desire against the value proposition they’re offered.  I’ve seen no evidence that is the case, so Apple is probably safe in betting that everyone they’ve already hooked will wander into an Apple store in a hypnotic trance and buy the latest doodad that Steve says they want.

It turns out that the unenumerated rights that we have inherent to us as human beings don’t really exist.  If you don’t keep your car in a garage and you don’t live in a gated community, the Ninth Circuit has determined that you have no reasonable expectation that the police will stay off your property to put a covert GPS tracking device on your car.  Sure, it’s your driveway and they’re trespassing if they walk on it, but since the mailman walks on your driveway to deliver mail, it’s okay for the government to walk on your driveway to spy on your vehicular movements.

Amazingly, if you park in a garage or live behind a wall in a gated community, the court thinks you’ve still got some rights.  Is this going to be a selling point for new community developers?  “Live here, the Fourth Amendment still applies.”

One more way that Google is showing its plans for the new Google Chrome OS machines – Google Voice inside Google Mail. Pin that tab and you’ve got a persistent connection to telephones, various instant messengers, and email. This comes out the same day that CrunchGear tells us that Google is working with Acer on the upcoming Chrome OS laptop with an old-school Atom CPU, 8 GB of flash RAM, a webcam and not much else.

Should be interesting, at least.

Maybe this story will start a new campaign like Mothers Against Dirty Drivers. Although the “nature” of the video is not disclosed, I’m willing to bet what type of video it was.

I can relate to this SO much.

It’s a few weeks old, but I just noticed this story from the Associated Press (permalink via Wired), which sounds like something you’d have expected from the Bush administration:

Political Appointees Vetted FOIA Requests

Seriously, President Obama? This is what you consider change we can believe in? Yes we can?  We can filter FOIA requests through political advisers so they can keep track of the political party asking for the information? We can filter requests to keep track of whether the requester is a journalist?

When this president was just taking office, he said, “For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city.” He cited abuse of the Freedom of Information Act, in particular. And, to be fair, the administration has reduced the backlog of FOIA requests and there is no indication they’ve denied requests inappropriately. But, it’s actually rather obviously unethical to pass requests that are required to be handled expediently through a layer of bureaucracy which is unnecessary to the process.

Yay for Changeâ„¢.

For those five science fiction geeks who haven’t seen it yet, may I present the only viral video I’ve heard of devoted to a Golden Age author: Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury. Embedded video after the break, since it is obviously Not Safe For Work (As an aside, this is likely the only time I’ll get to use the category tags of “Literary, Music, Video, and Geek” all on the same post).

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Why would a duck have a nest twenty feet off the ground?  Who knows, but it’s a good thing Joel Armstrong is around to catch the ducklings as they plummet to earth.

Wil Wheaton continues to prove that there are decent human beings that started out as child actors. An 8-year-old girl sent in her Wilpower fan club application back in the 80s, and the “6 to 8 weeks” ended up being much longer. She never got that fan club package, and the fan club folded many years ago. She’s now a professional writer and blogger, and when Wil Wheaton heard about her lack of Wilpower memorabilia, he fixed it. He found a set of fan club swag, and sent her a really funny letter. You should read it.

Wow, what a stunningly misleading headline and astounding display of a lack of understanding of internet architecture displayed in this Wired article.  This conflation of the client with the protocol is a very bizarre thing to see in a supposed techie magazine.

Wired claims that the web is dead, because the growth of “apps” (hate that term, it just means “programs” but with one fewer syllables) is showing that people would prefer purpose-built individual small clients to access data, rather than relying on somewhat clunky and standards-averse browser-based web applications. That hardly means the web is dead.  What pool of data do the Wired writers think these apps are accessing?  The Facebook client for the iPhone is connecting to the Facebook web site, using the open APIs that Facebook has made available for just that purpose.

Anderson and Wolff make a distinction that doesn’t seem to make sense, from a computer geek standpoint. It’s not as if the same information is not available via web browser as via the purpose-built mini-programs.  One example they use is the Netflix streaming service on an iPad.  I can get the same or better functionality from any web browser, so how is the web dead?  Another example is RSS feeds.  What protocol do Anderson and Wolff suppose RSS feeds are served through?  Hmmm, looks like HTTP which is serving up these RSS feeds of HTML information to a purpose-built or general-purpose browser equally.

Of course, since Wired predicted that “push” technology was going to kill the browser in 1997, maybe we should assume their prognostication abilities are not all they could be.

I do appreciate that they clarify that the web is not the totality of the internet, something I had the hardest time explaining to people in years past.  Since those days, though, the web has become almost the entirety of the internet traffic, minus email and P2P.  For those who aren’t running bittorrent clients, the distinction between “internet” and “web” is one without meaning today. As for the rise of the apps, I think they may be a stopgap for some things. For example, the app was necessary to get YouTube videos because Apple hates Flash.  If you had an iPhone and wanted to watch YouTube videos, using the Safari browser would make you sad. Now that YouTube is moving toward HTML5 standards-based video, there’s no benefit to the app over accessing the site via a normal browser.  The same has been happening with many other video sites – the conversion from proprietary applications to a rich standards-based web may render this predictive column as quaint as the one which said we’d all be running PointCast by 2000.