I don’t mean naughty. I’ve just been busy.
But, I’ve just come out with my first (of what will be a great many) batch of home made limoncello. I still haven’t tried it. But it looks all nice, bottled and corked.
One of these days I’m going to have to hook my phone up to the computer so I can actually post pictures.
nyea nyea :-p
The title is a lie. What I’m posting here is the original recipe from the book. I like it as a baseline chili recipe since it has all the essentials, making for a good platform to customize from.
But I keep losing my damn notes on how I mess with it. So I’ve got to start from scratch again. I figure if I keep it here then maybe I’ll feel sufficiently compelled to track my progress here that it’ll actually happen.
ANYway, here goes:
As this is a crock pot recipe, you can imagine the one line instructions.
Now, a lot of these things don’t make sense. A can of tomato sauce? what size? etc. I’ll noodle with it, see what I come up with and report back.
Things I generally add on:
- a Guinness
For decades I’ve wanted to set up a little computer with low power draw and some external hard drives to act as a file and process server, allowing me to bounce back and forth between operating systems and machines at will.
The thing that’s stopped me has really been the power requirements and noise of most of these things. Even those mini-atx cases are a bit too much with their several hundred watt draw.
What I DON’T want is one of those proprietary boxes like the WD “MyBookWorld” things. I’ve had those crap out on me before.
I was thinking about getting one of those little <a href=”http://www.zotacusa.com/products/mini-pcs”>ZOTAC</a> boxes. I don’t know though. I’m definitely going to have to shop around a bit. Looks like a job for <a href=”http://www.tomshardware.com/”>Tom’s Hardware</a>
Haven’t done a stupid web quiz in a while (years?) and I came across this one tonight. Figured, what the hell. Plus, I like the results so I’ll post it :p.
I Am A: Lawful Good Human Paladin/Ranger (3rd/3rd Level)
Ability Scores:
Strength-15
Dexterity-13
Constitution-13
Intelligence-15
Wisdom-14
Charisma-14
Alignment:
Lawful Good A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. He combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. He tells the truth, keeps his word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice. A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished. Lawful good is the best alignment you can be because it combines honor and compassion. However, lawful good can be a dangerous alignment when it restricts freedom and criminalizes self-interest.
Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.
Primary Class:
Paladins take their adventures seriously, and even a mundane mission is, in the heart of the paladin, a personal test an opportunity to demonstrate bravery, to learn tactics, and to find ways to do good. Divine power protects these warriors of virtue, warding off harm, protecting from disease, healing, and guarding against fear. The paladin can also direct this power to help others, healing wounds or curing diseases, and also use it to destroy evil. Experienced paladins can smite evil foes and turn away undead. A paladin’s Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that they can cast. Many of the paladin’s special abilities also benefit from a high Charisma score.
Secondary Class:
Rangers are skilled stalkers and hunters who make their home in the woods. Their martial skill is nearly the equal of the fighter, but they lack the latter’s dedication to the craft of fighting. Instead, the ranger focuses his skills and training on a specific enemy a type of creature he bears a vengeful grudge against and hunts above all others. Rangers often accept the role of protector, aiding those who live in or travel through the woods. His skills allow him to move quietly and stick to the shadows, especially in natural settings, and he also has special knowledge of certain types of creatures. Finally, an experienced ranger has such a tie to nature that he can actually draw on natural power to cast divine spells, much as a druid does, and like a druid he is often accompanied by animal companions. A ranger’s Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.
Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)
So I needed a single nut (1/2″x13tpi) for a project I’m working on. I went out and bought 8 from Lowes. Fair enough. While I was out I realized I needed a couple things at the stupidmarket, almonds, milk and such.
Wandering through Stop & Shop I got me a hankerin’ for cupcakes. Unfortunately all they had were Spiderman (slathered in blue frosting) and Dora (pink.)
I came home and tore in to the spiderman cupcakes like I was Doc Oc. After eating 4 I marveled at how much blue and red dye was all over my hands.
Took me a second to realize there was no red dye on the cupcakes and that I was bleeding profusely from someplace.
Yes. I seem somehow to have sliced my hand open.
Eating cupcakes.
worst. identity. hiding. proxy. ever.
Psyched. Start the new gig tomorrow. I don’t expect I’ll get much in the way of sleep tonight.
So the furnace is all happy nice nice (and has been for a couple weeks really.) I’ve dealt with some of the more flagrant offenses against heat retention in the house and now I’m down to a point where I have the thermostat tuned so well that a couple moments after I say “hmm… it’s getting chilly in here” I hear the furnace kick on.
This is far more in tune with the “engine room” of my house than I ever really wanted to be.
In other news, the syphon, bentonite, campden tablets and tubing have finally all come in from amazon, as of this afternoon. So after I sanitize a few wine bottles (in a bleach solution I guess) I’ll be spending the evening racking the mead (for what I expect is the first of several iterations of both racking and meadmaking.) Now if I could only find the original link where I found the recipe to begin with I’d be all set.
That aside I’m back to watching a LOT of stand up and I’m trying to understand why female comedians are just generally not that funny. Now, there ARE a couple stellar counter examples. But for the most part, they’re really not. Delivery is off, material seems a bit stale. It could simply be that the bar is higher for them to be produced and promoted, “Now I’d like that. But that shit ain’t the truth.”
I’ve found it’s generally true in meatspace as well. Women’s sense of humor in general isn’t any different than a men’s (screw it. If I’m going to wade into these waters, I might as well just dive.) But it’s rare that they’re funny themselves.
Now, like I said there are some wonderful counter examples. I present now, two such statistical anomalies ;-)
(this really is gonna just get me shot.)
I suppose I should have known what was going on. I’ve fought with this SugarCRM install process for days. Apparently what happened is that, at one point, I bricked the install while trying to manually configure it. I deleted the entire directory, re-extracted it from the distribution archive and just 777ed the whole damn tree, tapped the installation php page and it ran without a hitch.
So sadly I don’t know which of the intermediate steps was responsible for fixing the problem I was having. Alas.
I’ve mentioned before that I really love the Buddha Bar series for sonic wallpaper while I’m at the computer. But lately I’ve been listening to this. I may have posted it before, but if I don’t remember I can’t see how you would. It has the advantage of being contained in a single youtube vid (which, if you’re clever, you can download the mp3 of.)
Most “chill out” and loungy compilations really just suck. But this is definitely solid. I particularly like that the track listing is in the description.
Here. Turns out it copies out pretty well:
0:00 Jose Delgado - Freegull
5:10 West Maui Beach Resort - Spanish Fly
9:00 Cachivache - Alma Chillout
13:17 Arno Elias - El Corazon
18:03 Vangelis - Spanish Harbour
24:22 Bebe - Sempre Me Quedara
28:00 Tarifa Chill Out - Quien
33:10 El Lado Oscuro - Jarabe De Palo
37:33 Deepak Chopra feat Adriana Castelazo - In Love With You
40:15 Reflejo de luna - El Alacran
44:25 Arno Elias & Niño - Amor Amor
48:00 Tan Cañi - Alhoevera
It’s always JUST long enough between times I set up a lamp stack that I have to look everything up all over again.
I particularly love the ‘just use our automated installation php script’ …. that doesn’t work.
UPDATE: Better. Now that I’ve plugged a sample config_si.php in, it’s just bitching about not being able to load the DB manager. Not the same error, so that counts as progress.
I ended up having a much different weekend than I expected (”did I get it did I get it did I get it” stress aside.)
My furnace just… stopped on Friday. Didn’t explode. No fancy symptoms. It just started getting cold. Of course I didn’t notice it until I returned home for the evening, when it was far too late to be screwing around in the basement (too much.)
I pulled out the electric heater, went to bed and thought nothing of it ’til Saturday when I decided I’d tackle it. I’m in a position where I need to fix it if at all possible. So I spent sporadic blocks of the day winging it, while heating the livingroom with the electric and eating reheated chili.
Now that DID go as planned. Well… erm… I suppose technically it didn’t. But it came out pretty good. I realized as I made it that while I have a standard recipe I “use”, “using” it really just entails staring at the open page in the cookbook while I do whatever the hell I’m going to do anyway. Then I wonder why I have no consistency. There were a couple things I forgot to buy at the stupid market, so here’s how it actually went:
4 pounds of ground beef (I use whatever I’ve got at hand, usually 80 or 85% lean.)
2 large white onions
2 cans of diced tomatoes.
1 small can of tomato sauce (one of those little Contadina 6oz jobbies is fine.)
1 green pepper (blergh.)
1 can EACH of pinto, black and refried beans
1 cup of flour
12oz (or so, bias up) jar of hot salsa (cheaty McCheaterson)
For spices:
A tablespoon (or two ish) each of:
- cumin
- chili powder
- oregano
- salt
Lots and lots of minced garlic (Probably about 4 tablespoons of it.)
1) heat up a skillet pretty hot and put a couple tablespoons of oil in there (might be entirely unnecessary. Putting oil in a heating skillet is a reflex at this point.)
2) dump the ground beef in a bowl with the flour. Break it up and toss it around ’til it’s covered. Don’t bother getting all crazy with it. (I like my chili to be a gloppy mess. It’s somewhere between dip, soup and chili in consistency. The flour (along with the refried beans) gives it that thick texture.
3) Brown the beef (covered with flour) in the skillet, then toss it in the crock pot.
4) chop up the onions and pepper pretty fine (if you’re like me and don’t like large chunks of vegetable matter, then you can sweat the chopped onions a bit in the still hot frying pan.)
5) throw everything in the crock pot and turn it on low. (I can’t imagine a universe where sequence will make a lick of sense.)
6) Wait 6-7 hours. I actually tend to start this before bed and deal with it in the morning.
It might seem like a lot of spices. But I make this in a 7 quart crock pot, and I cook it on low for a LONG time. That process tends to wick out a lot of spice flavor. (It occurs to me as I type that that perhaps adding spices in for the final hour might not be so bad an idea.)
It was better than usual by far. A couple spices could’ve been amped up (or, as I theorized, perhaps added towards the end of things.) Next time I may mince up a couple chipotle peppers and drop them in there. Last time I did two cans, not realizing they were BIG cans and almost destroyed the batch. (But, thanks to Scott I learned that the heat in question was alkaline and therefore, a little lemon juice would really pull it back, which it did. Also ended up adding an interesting flavor on top of it all.
What I forgot:
Beer. Adding a 16oz guinness stout to this thing makes a world of wonderful difference.
My chili won’t win any awards. I’m just not that motivated by it. There is a lot of room for improvement, and I’ll be tweaking it forever, but at this point it fully satisfies the need for something thick, hot and yummy, so I may just let myself get lazy about the whole thing.
So after being sick of looking at it on Saturday, I went to bed and called my next door neighbor in the morning (he’s an HVAC guy, so that makes sense.) After two days of my screwing around fruitlessly with the damn thing, he came in, checked out a few things, then showed me the OTHER other reset button.
Yeah. Two days without heat in sub freezing weather, ice in the kitchen and it was a reset button. He then proceeded to give me the “dude, I’m not trying to scare you, but this thing is almost 40 years old. It’s amazing that it’s still running.” lecture which frankly I appreciated.
I’m likely going to spend tonight installing Sugar CRM on my desktop and putting it through its paces.
Now that’s what I call a long weekend Friday night! All I need is another bottle of diet mountain dew and some doritos.
Okay, I’ll be watching this piece of bizarre hilarity a bunch as well:
(Of course this is from Lee Ann, why even ask any more?)
It never ceases to amaze me what people divulge by accident.
There is so much involved in every word, every gesture, every private thought we let cross our faces, thinking them unsaid, that may as well be painted on the side of a barn for those of us who spend a significant portion of our lives watching people.
The funny part is that when I have an emotional investment in something, be it a date, or *ahem* an interview, I have NO ability to read the emotional reaction of the participants. I never have any idea “how it went”.
THAT said, I had what was without a doubt the strangest interview I’ve ever had in what is without a doubt the strangest location I’ve ever had one.
I sure hope they’re interested. It seems like the perfect departure from all the things I hate about BIG finance. I even caught myself apologizing for sounding like I was pandering. The trick about an interview (or a date for that matter) is to sell yourself to someone trying to sell THEMselves all the while trying to see through the other person’s salesmanship to the truth so you can determine whether or not it matches what’s coming out of their mouth.
I could say why this was such a strange interview. But to be honest, it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody who’d ever read this…
…unless of course you already know ;-)
And, to the rest of you: Don’t you HATE it when I do that? :p
From The Morlock Revolt
I can’t find my camera so I don’t have any pics to go with this.
As you all know (well, both of you) I’ve been baking bread for about 12 years. I’ve gotten to the point where, if I bake it with commercial yeast, I can predict the outcome pretty well. If I fail I generally know why. Not to say I’ve perfected anything. But I know what I’m doing now.
I have two sourdough “things” in my fridge. One is a straight starter and the other is a 1.5 pound ball of dough.
Every three to four days (or so) I take the dough out, split it in half, bake half, replenish it, then put it back. Since it’s a full dough I use flour, water and salt. It ferments more slowly than the starter due to the salt, but it does still come up pretty solidly in a few days.
I do the same thing with the starter, though I generally put the “discarded” half back in the ball of dough so I’m not actually throwing it away (and yes, I adjust the salt appropriately.)
Now, to the problem: No matter what I do, whether I use several stages of preferment or bake it after a half hour of resting in form (or an hour, or two) the resulting crumb is always a little… gummy. It’s fully cooked, the internal temperature on last night’s loaves tested at 208 and change, which is a nice sweet spot for bread doneness.
But still, even with a delightfully complex flavor, a bit of sourness that didn’t overpower (not that I mind that so much) the crumb is just… spongy.
It looks for all the world like it’s merely undercooked. But I know from experimentation that if I leave it in the oven that property never dissipates.
It’s been driving me nuts for years. But I’d always assumed that somehow it was just undercooked until a month or so ago, when I started baking them to death.
I’ll figure it out, I’m sure. But in the meantime if anyone’s got any smartsauce, I’d be happy to hear it.
My lol of the day from Oprah Guru Extraordinaire:
Facts mislead. Trust your feelings. #CosmicConsciousness
— Deepak Chopra (@DeepakChopra) February 6, 2013
I mean… shit. Do I even have to start? “Facts mislead” o.O?
What kind of retarded fucking assclown…
So I ran a backup of most of my stuff, then pulled the drive and swapped in an old 1T drive from my previous box. I booted up the Ubuntu 12.10 installation CD (It’s a mini iso that just runs the bootstrap of a full downloaded install) and blew it out and slapped ubuntu on there.
The trick is to be “sure” my backup pulled everything important. Worst case scenario I’ve got the original drive, so I can always mount it via a usb cable I have for such things.
Once you actually noodle with the installation a bit (and stop using Unity), this is actually really fast. I’m still restoring things from my backup drive (notably my music) so I’m not fully functional yet.
If I’d had my head about me (which I decidedly haven’t for the last few days) I’d have started an installation log. The only real surprise is that I’m using Nightingale for music (so far.) It’s the successor to Songbird, which you may remember I was really enjoying for Windows. Anyway they dropped linux support a few years ago and someone picked it up. It’s not as far along as songbird, but so far I certainly like it. I’m listening to country music on shoutcast while it imports my mp3 libraries.
So we’ll see how it goes.
It’s maddening trying to keep interested, busy and productive in the job search. The second month can really wear you down after you’ve shot your resume out there so many dozens of times, had endless conversations with recruiters, all resulting in nothing past “I’ll send it over and we’ll see.” Then no word and no real response when you follow up.
I understand. When I’m interviewing people I rarely contact the people who sent me the resumes to say “no thanks.” There are just too many. So the recruiters are generally not responding because they haven’t heard anything.
But in this pursuit, no news is bad news, so you keep a stiff upper lip and cheerfully check in while you keep looking.
Even the recruiter spam, which causes blood vessels to burst in my head “I have a great opportunity for a Satellite Dish technician in Arkansas that you’d be PERFECT for!” I now have to respond to with “Hey, thanks for the contact. That’s outside my range a bit, but I know a couple people I can forward this to along with your contact information. In the meantime, here’s another copy of my resume since you didn’t even glance at the first one I sent you, along with all the rest of the pertinent information you so brazenly ignored in sending me this spammy fucking tripe to begin with! Have a spectacular day and best of luck in filling that job you ignorant twit! I’m gonna go scream in my ramen noodles now.”
But I don’t really rip them a new one. I keep plugging away at amazon, new recruiter lists. I send introductions, make my calls, etc.
SO, “to keep myself honest” I’ve started logging what I’ve been doing. Not just on the job search itself, but a sort of tally of how I spent the day. Because it’s one of those things, when you’re at home in front of a computer for something horrifically close to 18 hours a day, with occasional guilt ridden forays in to the wood shop.
The original thought was I could easily wake up and have it be days, weeks or months later and have no specific memory of any of these individual days. So at LEAST put something down. The side effect, like when you track anything, is that somewhere in the back of your head you’re going to want that list to ’say good things’, and it’s going to figure in to your day and push you in the right direction in that passive aggressive sort of way that future accountability tends to.
What I’d started doing was taking an 8.5×11 notebook (one of the Staples arc notebooks rather than the Levengers Circa notebooks. The circa stuff is awesome, but there’s just no reason to charge those prices now that there are competing products that use exactly the same ring shape and spacing. Sure, the Circa paper is higher quality, but that’s just not enough of a reason) and, at the end of the day, put a dated entry and fill in a couple/few highlights of the day.
But I found myself cheating and skipping a day or two at a time (primarily because I’d been almost entirely unproductive), then going back and filling them in.
So instead I started keeping it next to me at the computer and filling it up with little notes and things during the day. So far so good.
Now that January’s over I took a look at the few pages of bullet items and realized the notebook is just too big for what I’m using it for, so I switched to one of those 5×9 inch smaller format notebooks starting for Feb. Plus, I think I’m going to lower the bar for what makes the cut to be worth tracking.
I figure it’ll be easier to manage and do a bit more to keep pulling me in the right direction.
If nothing else I’ll at least be able to put “blog post” on there for today.
Thanks to madame over at Chez Cheese for my new mind worm. I’ve listened to this a clean three dozen times since her post, including four times in the last 20 minutes or so.
Aside from having that awesome lead in (is that technically a vamp?) This song is most of my internal soundtrack.
Now, I know people will watch that and get all “oh, cute. Like he’s frenetic and stuff. I get it.” But no. This is actually a bit low key compared to what’s usually ripping through my skull and, combined with the second song (pasted below for the sake of convenience (mine, not yours, though sure, yours too)) they really comprise the kind mental landscape I deal with most of the time.
