Coffin Nail

Something horrible may have happened.  Scientists may have shortened the life span of the universe, just by looking at it!  Once would have been bad enough, but you know how scientists are.

Scientist 1: Looks in scientific instrument, then does some calculations.  He looks ups up. Whoa! He looks into the instrument again and then does some more calculations.  [slapping a co-worker on the shoulder] Dude!  Check this out.

Scientist 2: What? He looks into the scientific instrument.
Scientist 1: Now finish these calculations.
Scientist 2: Scribbles a bit.  Whoa!  He repeats the process again.  Everytime we look at this stuff, the universe dies a little faster.  That’s awesome!
Scientist 1: Looks into the instrument and then away.  Hey, check it out, what am I? He keeps looking into and away from the instrument.  I’m a cigarette for the universe!
Scientist 1 & 2: Laughs
Scientist 2: Dude, we gotta tell Patty about this.  She’ll think it’s a gas.

So there’s no telling how long the universe has got now.  So, to fix it, I recommend doing the only logical thing:  Class action lawsuit.  Everybody in the world joins in and sues these scientists for… something.  Something big.  Then, if we’re patient, we all make a little bit of money.

I know this doesn’t make it right.  It certainly doesn’t fix anything.  But it does give us all a little bit of extra money, and I think that’s the American way.  Besides, think of your grandchildren and what kind of universe they’ll have to grow up in.

Doing The Linux Thing

Great.  Yesterday I managed to get KDE 4 running properly.  Or as properly as an incomplete RC1 will be.  Which isn’t too bad.  I experienced quite a few crashes and I can’t end the session without crashing it.  But it’s still mostly usable. And it looks interesting.

I also got Apache installed and running.  And PHP, with a bit of mental wrestling with my USE flags.  Sheesh.  But it’s all there.  Oh, and I fixed my spell checking problem with OpenOffice.  It was a day of triumphs!

Now I’m going to teach myself PHP.  I reckon I’ll be using Quanta because it’s easier that way.

KDE 4 RC1

I took the plunge and installed KDE 4 RC1 on my Gentoo installation.  It went quite smoothly with the only thing not working being the networking stuff.  Once again, Kopete caused problems so I skipped the whole thing.  Maybe I’ll see if I can get that fixed this morning.

So far I think it’s looking pretty good.  I’m not sure if this is supposed to happen or not, but it looks like the KDE 3.5 and Kicker are being loaded just before the KDE4 stuff.  That makes me confused.

Home Made Soup

It appears that there are people who believe that meals should start with soup and salad. I’ve never heard of having soup on Thanksgiving Day but, hey, it takes all kinds.

I’ve heard of soup after Thanksgiving. Turkey soup, to be specific. And turkey sandwiches, turkey pot pie, turkey casserole, turkey salad, turkey nachos, turkey quesadillas, turkey dip, french fried turkey fingers, turkey a la mode, and other crazy things that people do to use up all the turkey from Thanksgiving.

Anyway, here’s my recipe for home made tomato soup. On the cheap.

You’ll need:

• A bowl
• Hot water
• Lots of ketchup packets

I recommend going to a food court in a large shopping mall to get your ketchup packets. Just breeze by all the fast food places and grab a handful. With the attitude those teenage counter workers have this day (so apathetic) they’ll probably give you a bag of them just to “stick it to the boss man.” If you like your tomato soup spicy then make sure you hit up the Taco Bell for some hot sauce. You can probably use regular store bought ketchup, too, but I didn’t budget my Thanksgiving dinner for soup so I didn’t try it.

After you have your ketchup (some places have ‘catsup’) you’re ready to start.

Heat up your water until it’s hot. Pour it into a bowl. Then open up all those ketchup packets and empty into the hot water. Stir vigorously! If you have any Taco Bell hot sauce packets, now is the time to add them.

If your soup is too thin, add more ketchup. Your neighbors will probably lend you a cup of ketchup if you ask nicely.

If you’re adventurous in the kitchen (wink, wink) then you may want to experiment with different packets for different soups. Like mustard soup, relish soup (or a combination of mustard and relish with sliced hot dogs), soy sauce soup, or mayonnaise soup. I don’t know that you’d want to eat any of those, but making them would be a breeze.

As far as the salad goes, well, put some lettuce and tomato on your Thanksgiving Turkey Sandwich.

If you can think of anything else that comes in a packet drop me a line. That’s all I could think of.

Thanksgiving — On the cheap

Thanksgiving Day is nearly here. It’ll be here in less than a week. This can be a stressful time, especially with all the work that goes into creating a lovely Thanksgiving meal.

So this year I’m going to cheap out. I figure I can cut down costs if I stick with these ingredients:

• Sliced turkey deli meat
• Loaf of bread, thin sliced (59¢ at HEB!)
• Can of cranberry “sauce”
• Can of green beans
• Box of instant mashed potatoes
• 1 Packet of gravy mix
• 1 Can of pumpkin pie filler
• 1 Can of Yams or sweet potatoes

See, you take two slices of bread, put some turkey slices on it (thin sliced is best so you can kind of crumple up the turkey and make it look nice). Open the can of cranberry “sauce” (it’s more of a jelly to me) and slice off a round and put it on the turkey. Close up the bread and you have your main course. Since stuffing is made out of bread, you get that with your turkey, too.

The green beans and yams (or sweet potatoes) can be heated up in a microwave.

The instant mashed potatoes is probably the most labor intensive portion. But here’s a tip: you don’t really need butter and milk to make it. You can do it just using hot water. If you’re hot water heater is set to high you can probably do it with tap water. You could probably do the same for the gravy mix.

No Thanksgiving dinner would be complete without dessert, and I budgeted that in. Frozen pumpkin pies are way too expensive, so we’re going to make one. It’s not really a pie, though.

1. Take two pieces of bread and cut the crusts off
2. Take a couple of spoons of the pumpkin pie filling and place in the center of one of the slices of bread.
3. Take the remaining slice of bread and put it on top of the pumpkin stuff.
4. Squish down the edges of the bread so you meld the top and bottom together while leaving a pocket of pumpkin in the center.

Et viola! You have a pumpkin… thing… for dessert. If you wanted to get fancy you could probably deep fry it. That might kill you, though. Seriously.

Obviously you can make substitutions. Changing the turkey for ham, for instance. Or the green beans for any canned vegetable of your choice. You could even go “Old World” and use pumpernickel bread. I don’t know how that would taste with pumpkin pie filling, so you may want to replace that with peanut butter and jelly.

If you have any money or time saving Thanksgiving ideas don’t hesitate to let me know.

LiveJournal Tags: thanksgiving, recipe, cheap, yuck

Dunkin’ Donuts

Back in the old days, when I was a kid, there were times when I didn’t have school or was too sick to go to school. My dad, being a single parent, would sometimes have to take me with him to work.

Sometimes, when it was time for lunch, we would go to Dunkin’ Donuts. On the menu was an item that read, “Bowl Bread Butter Donut.” That was a bowl of soup, a piece of bread, some butter and, most wondrous of all, a donut. And that’s what we would have. The soup changed. Sometimes it was chicken noodle, sometimes it was beef barley. That’s when I learned the importance of stirring your soup so the hot stuff at the bottom would be cycled to the top and cool off.

But that wasn’t the important bit. No, the best part was at the end when you got your donut. I would get the Bavarian Creme. My dad would get a cruller, which seemed kind of boring to me. Those were good times.

As I got older I developed a taste for Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I loved it. When I had a friend working at a Dunkin’ Donuts I would drop in frequently for a donut and some coffee. I liked it so much I would buy a ½ pound to bring home with me. Up north, Dunkin’ Donuts were just about everywhere.

This is a MapQuest map that shows my home town, Parsippany, NJ. There’s five right there and another 46 within ten miles. Wow!

This is a Google Maps picture of how many Dunkin’ Donuts there are where I live now. One. You might be wondering why I used Google to find it and not Dunkin’ Donuts store locator. It’s because, according to the official site, there are no Dunkin’ Donuts around here. Needless to say, I haven’t had anything DD related since I moved to Texas.

Until this morning. My friend Dan brought me two honest-to-God Dunkin’ Donuts, bless his heart. They weren’t Bavarian Creme, but they were good nonetheless. I didn’t have any DD coffee, either, but such things can’t be helped. I’m just glad I was able to have what I got before I bite the dust.

Technorati Tags: dunkin, donut, austin, parsippany, coffee, soup, memories, lunch

Black Adder

There was nothing better to watch last night so I figured it was time to pop in the old Black Adder tapes. I settled on Series 3 because the Prince is so stupid, and because it has my favorite word in the first episode: “Anti-distinctly-minty.” You can’t go wrong with that.

Amazon.com: Black Adder – The Complete Collector’s Set ASIN: B000EBCEVS

I see some of Live Writer’s plug-ins need some work. I’m sure that Amazon linker thing could be done a wee bit better.

Anyway. People usually talk about “comfort foods.” These are foods that you eat because they make you feel better. Maybe you’re down in the dumps and cinnamon toast perks you up. Stuff like that. Or you’re depressed, so you buy a bunch of Ho-Ho’s and watch M*A*S*H re-runs.

Black Adder, Red Dwarf and Jurassic Park are my “comfort videos.” I don’t really know why Jurassic Park is in there, but if I’m at a loss to watch something but I need to have something playing on the boob tube then JP gets the job.

I just scarfed down some oatmeal. All that talk of Ho-Ho’s made me hungry. At least I ate kind of healthy. Of course, I got another coffee, too. I just needed it, that’s all.

Autumn is back in Austin. It’s chilly and windy. I wonder if it’s a chili night? Or stew? Or soup? Perhaps I should brave the chill wind and fire up the BBQ?

Maybe I should just go to the Outback.

Ars Technica has a review of Super Mario Galaxy. It looks like they’ve gone ga-ga over it, in a big way. I really miss being able to play games like this. Mario, Spyro and Ratchet & Clank especially.

LiveJournal Tags: black adder, mario, wii, minty, red dwarf, oatmeal, breakfast, mash, re-run, ho-ho

Molten Hershey

Yesterday I had to get something from the center console of the car.  As I was rummaging through the junk in there I came across a treasure.  A lost treasure.  A forgotten treasure!

It was a Hershey’s chocolate bar that I had gotten at HEB some time back, when I was in need of a snack and it cost 33¢.  Which I didn’t eat and ended up throwing it into the center console so I could bring it to work.  And then I forgot about it.  For quite some time.

Until yesterday, when I found it again.  Now, it’s been in the console for a few weeks.  And the temperature has fluctuated a number of times.  The console is also right above the transmission.

Let’s just say this candy bar was not in a solid state when my questing fingers groped it.  Let’s also recognize that the new Hershey’s wrapper is pretty good at sealing in liquids.

I brought it inside with me and put it on the air conditioner vent in the floor so it would turn solid again.  Then I nearly forgot about it again.  But after sitting around for a while and getting hungry and wishing I had something to snack on, I remembered about the melted candy bar sitting at my feet.  It was pretty solid by now, thanks to the cold air.  So I ate it.  It didn’t look anything like a candy bar, I’ll tell you that.  But it still tasted like one, and that’s good enough for me.

---

I’m sure this is unrelated, but I woke up this morning feeling like crap.  I feel better now, though.  Maybe it was the combination of a melted/solidified chocolate bar and the soggy KFC.  I don’t think I ate well at all yesterday, come to think of it.  I might have been better off just eating the bucket of lard that’s in the pantry.

---

I’m beginning to like Live Writer a bit more.  It’s easier dealing with pictures, and I’ve got some nice plug-ins so I can do more interesting things.  It still seems kind of home made to me, though.

LiveJournal Tags: Hershey, chocolate, bar, buried, treasure, kfc, sick, vomit, heb

Liveified

Okay, I went nuts this morning and installed all of the recently non-beta-ized Live programs.  These include:

• Live Writer — Allows you to write blog entries with a real editor and send it to different blogs.  This isn’t limited to Microsoft’s Live Spaces, either.  You can send it to WordPress, Live Journal, and others.
• Live Mail — Let’s you get your mail from your Hotmail account and, presumably, Yahoo! if you have a premium email account.
• Live Messenger — The newest version of Microsoft Messenger.
• Live Photo Gallery — Shows you pictures and allows you to add tags and upload them to Live Spaces and Flickr.

They’re kind of neat, although everything is running a bit slow with Live Mail going.  And I’ve already gotten errors about not being able to get my mail from it.  And I have a problem selecting an email and dragging it to a folder.  I have to take two tries to get that done.  Otherwise it looks okay.  Not really a step up from using Live Hotmail in a browser.  Or whatever they’re calling it.  Oh, you can also post your email directly to your blog with it.  I don’t know why you would want to do this, but you can.

I’m just not overwhelmed with any of it.  Give me a while and maybe I’ll feel like I can’t live without it.  Although…  It is really nice to be able to send my blogs to three or four different sites without having to log into all of them.  I noticed that MySpace is not supported, which is a shame since it’s one of the biggest ones out there.

 

Technorati Tags: microsoft, live writer, live, blog

Morning Radio

After I got my Atari 400 up into my bedroom I became an early morning person.  The reason for this was because I became a heavy user of different BBS places.  Because most BBS’ at the time only had one phone line, the busier places would always be busy.  Except at ludicrously early hours.  Hence, I would get up at a ludicrously early time and call up.

As a consequence, I was never late for school.  In fact, I would be early there, too.  I managed to get most of my homework done in that time.  Another side effect was that I could listen to the radio on snowy mornings and listen for school closings.

I would listen to WDHA (105.5, the Rock of New Jersey) since they were pretty current with the school closings.  And they had better music than the other stations that announced school closings.  Some of my fondest memories are of seeing the snow come down outside, playing a game on the 400, and listening to David Bowie, or Queen, or Pink Floyd, or whatever, on the radio — safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to go to school that day.

I never thought I’d be reminiscing about it some twenty years later, though.  It probably would have been a lot different if I had the internet then, too.