VMFR: Burger King Ketchup & Fries

Thank you for being here for another installment of Vending Machine Food Review. Today we bring you the remarkable taste of “Burger King Ketchup & Fries.”

First, the packaging. The product comes in a 1.75oz bag. In the bag, the product takes up less than 1/3 of the bag. Contents shift during shipping and all that. Also, despite it being in a bag, the text assures me that I can “HAVE IT YOUR WAY.” I don’t see how that’s possible, since it’s a pre-packaged food.

Opening the bag, one is immediately hit by the scent of ketchup. It’s quite amazing. The snacks themselves are made of potato, according to the ingredients. They look like flat french fries covered in red dust.

When you eat one, two things come immediately to mind:

1) They don’t taste anything like french fries. They kind of taste like re-constituted potato snacks.

2) It tastes like they’re covered in ketchup.

Point #2 is remarkable because, again according to the ingredients, there is nothing even remotely resembling a tomato involved in the creation of these snacks. Somehow they got the power of ketchup into a dust.

When all the chips, I mean fries, are gone you’re left with a sack full of red ketchup dust. As an experiment I tipped the sack of dust into my mouth and let it sit there. After it gained enough moisture it was almost like sucking on a ketchup packet.

Well done.

Updating KDE4

So it’s been a while since I wrote anything up about Gentoo, Linux, and KDE 4.  Where I got stuck at last time was that KDE4 wanted a newer version of QT4, but the QT4 in Gentoo’s Portage didn’t get along very well with KDE4.

I bit the bullet and skimmed through some articles on the Gentoo Forums and found the instructions for getting QT4 through SVN by adding another overlay.  It wasn’t quite as easy as getting KDE4 from an overlay, but hey, it worked in the end.

So I updated QT4, got KDE4 to compile, and it finished last night.  I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, so I can’t say much.  I know I’m still getting those graphical glitches.  If no one else is getting them then I think I need to delete everything and start over.  Maybe it’s just an oddball setting, I don’t know.

I do know that if you miss having a trash can on the desktop there’s a new trash can widget in extragear-plasma that should do the trick nicely.

 

Time To Take Out The Trash

The best part of family visits is that everyone gets to pitch in and clean the house.

Wait.  No, that’s not the best part at all.  That’s the worst part.  Running around and trying to straighten everything up, get the gunk off the walls, clean the bathrooms, do all the laundry that ends up getting stacked in the corners, peeling pancakes off the ceiling.  No, that’s not good at all.

And my dryer sucks.  I put a bunch of shirts in the dryer and close the door.  I start it up and check on it an hour later and find out that the door got opened and a shirt got caught on the inner latch.  How did that happen?  And, apparently the door didn’t open then and it continued to spin.  So the shirt was all wound up.  And all the shirts that were tumbling with it got wound up in the shirt.  By the time the door opened and stopped the dryer, there’s a big long twisted rope in there.

There were times when I ended up being a perch for a while.  Washing dishes with a parrot on your shoulder is quite the experience.  If you

close your eyes you can almost imagine that you’re on some pirate ship and somehow you managed to piss off the captain, so now you’re doing the dishes.  Or your a cabin boy.  That fantasy isn’t really for me, though.  So, I had to give her a Goofball and that kept her occupied for a while.  A Goofball is strips of rawhide wrapped in a ball shape around a tasty parrot treat.

That’s how the weekend went.  Nothing terribly exciting.