I dreamed vividly of cyberpunk last night with public access terminals on the street being vied for by the elite few with Linux ultra mobile PCs and the hacking knowledge to access anonymously. I had setup my station when I realized my usb drive was left in the car in the adjacent parking garage. A naive onlooker had joined me on my portable bench and I was offering him access in exchange for protecting my gear when an obviously knowledgeable person tried to con his way in to plant a process that would have had my legitimate account quickly suspended. I couldn’t walk away and I couldn’t work without that usb drive. I woke fighting dizzy spells.
Month: November 2008
Bansky has not visited Knoxville
Looks like we have some subculture.
Today’s Goals
Today’s goals are: program, decorate the house for Christmas, clean, do some things the wife has requested, and make one improvement to the house.
How to clear a room of children
We know we can clear a room of teenagers with high frequencies but how do we get the single digits to go to another part of the house? Simple. Put Fantasia on the television.
Computer with early onset Alzeheimer’s
Nothing makes Black Friday blacker than rebooting your development server to see the ever familiar memory test run and instead of completing having the message "Memory Error!" appear on the boot screen. My first game console was an Atari 2600 circa 1978. My first computer was an Atari 400 around 1980 and my father with me helping (looking over his shoulder) upgraded the memory from 8kb to 32kb by soldering a chip to the motherboard. Can you imagine the tech support calls if that was the procedure today? "Yes sir. My name really is Steve. Now, did the soldering iron go all the way through the motherboard or just your CPU?" I have never seen a memory error until today. I made it through a reboot so hopefully it was a fluke.
Gobble Gobble!
Happy Thanksgiving! If I recall correctly, this is the holiday we celebrate that a native people showed us how to survive through the winter so that we could kill them with disease in the Spring and steal their land. Oh, and we should be eating lobster not turkey. While you prepare for your feast today, take a little under a half an hour and enjoy the full episode of the famous WKRP Thanksgiving Turkey Drop!
This morning I awoke before anyone else to enjoy the calm, quiet of the early morning. I freed the Roomba from the chairleg which had defeated it during its nightly run. It happily continued cleaning the floors which I prepared to make some dishes for today’s feast. Remarkably, the little ones slept in and when they did rise, the television seemed "broken" to them so the house remained someone quiet as they played with toys. The first item on my list is Buffet Cranberry Mold. Btw, when the recipe says "chlll for an hour and in the meantime…" meantime doesn’t mean go sit on the computer and blog. Meantime means you will use the entire hour to chop up the fruit unless you are fortunate enough to own a food processor.
Buffet Cranberry Mold
Time: early in the day or day ahead
Yield: 16 servings
- 1 envelop unflavored gelatin
- water
- 2 6-ounce packages strawberry-flavor gelatin
- 3 medium-sized oranges
- 1 12-ounce package fresh or frozen cranberries (3 cups)
- 1½ cups sugar
- In 4-quart saucepan, evenly sprink unflavored gelatin over 2 cups water; let stand 1 minute to soften slightly. Over medium heat, cooke, stirring, until gelatin dissolves and mixture boils. Remove from heat; stir in strawberry gelatin until dissolved. Stir in 3 cups cold water. Refrigerate until mixture mounds slightly when dropped from a spoon, about 1 hour.
- Meanwhile, remove peel and white membrane from oranges; chop oranges and place in bowl. Chop cranberries; add with sugar to bowl. Stir mixture until sugar is dissolved.
- Fold fruit mixture into thickened gelatin. Pour into 12-cup Bundt pan or mold. Cover and refrigerate until set, about 3 hours.
- To serve, unmold gelatin onto platter.
175 calories per serving. Low in sodiu,m, fat, cholesterol.
[Source, The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook, Hearst Books New York, 1986, ISBN: 0-688-03897-2, p.413]
Chopping cranberries by hand takes forever! I ended up letting my gelatin sit in the refrigerator for 1½ hours before mixing in the fruit and everything worked out fine. Next recipe is Dark Chocolate Mousse from The Food Network. I am doubling the recipe and based upon the comments using 3½ tablespoons sugar for each portion (7 tablespoons total).
The third item is Caramel-topped Rice Pudding.
- 2 tablespoons short-grained rice
- 1-2 tablespoons sugar
- 2½ cups milk
- light brown sugar
Put rice into an overproof dish. Add 1-2 tablespoons sugar to taste and milk. Stir to combine. Bake in the bottom of a preheated oven, 325° for 1 hour. Remove from oven. Top with a layer of brown sugar. Reduce over to 275° and cook for 20-25 minutes more, to allow topping to caramelize, or broil under high heat until sugar caramelizes. 2-3 servings.
[Source, The Ultimate 4 Ingrediant Cookbook, Chancellor Press, 2001, ISBN: 0-7537-0458-7, p. 308]
I doubled the recipe and left it in the oven at 325%deg; for 1 hour and 10 minutes. The extra 10 minutes was a mistake and caused the surface to bubble. When adding the light brown sugar, the bubble burst and left the center as liquid without caramelizing. Otherwise it looks good.
LOST connection?
The Black Rock, a slave ship, has been discovered wrecked off the Turks and Caicos Islands.
…in 1841, an accident that set free the ancestors of many current residents of those islands. …When the wreck was first discovered in 2004 it was named the Black Rock ship because the researchers were unsure of its identity. [Source, LiveScience, Remains of Slave Ship Found]
The worm got away
I tried to be an early bird today with much fail. Waking times: 2:20, 3:30, 4:10, 5:30, 5:55, 6:00, 6:30, and finally 6:45. Now that’s sleeping!
Photo Revenge
Because I posted this picture instead of that picture Cathy took a picture of me in 40°C or 50°C weather when I took a quick moment to decorate our skeleton.
Peter Schiff Knows!
WKRP Thanksgiving Turkey Drop
Since Thanksgiving is this week, it is important that we rewatch the famous WKRP Thanksgiving Turkey Drop. Thanks to Hulu, we have the entire episode available! This is a repost but last year I just did the one scene.
As God as my witness..I thought turkeys could fly.
The next hour’s challenge
My current project has been experimented on, tweaked, and change requested into a CSS mess. I’m going to dump all the CSS and start fresh. This has to happen and many projects skip this step as cumbersome.
Update: Really cleaned up the development environment and production server by removing test files, unnecessarily included (old and unused) code, and so forth. Much improved!
I see suspicious activity!
Time to take pause from programming and do a quick upgrade to the blogs. Looks like someone is trying to do bad things. Alright. Everything is backed up. Next step, remove users that are obviously malicious. I have turned off allowing users to register since I don’t currently use features that would ever require you to be logged into RealityMe. If I accidentally deleted your account and you want to be registered at RealityMe just let me know. Deleted 40 megs of data that had accumulated in wp_sk2_spams and wp_sk2_logs. I have 52078 comments in wp_comments marked as spam constituting roughly 34.1mb. I can find no dependencies between the wp_comments table and any other data so those comments are being deleted. As an aside, I have 3770 comments that are approved constituting 1.8mb of data. I used "delete FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ‘spam’" so if your comment was inadvertently marked as spam and I didn’t catch it, my apologies. My final step today is to upgrade from 2.6.2 to 2.6.3.
Of Grasshoppers
Student: I try cleaning but the mess only gets worse.
Master: Try starting without the mess.
Timber…oh?..Coder!
Today is Sunday so I thought divinity might be on my side and I had hoped to see about cutting down a tree. Unfortunately I am coding instead.
