A juggling technophile shares personal stories, challenges, humor and perhaps some political commentary.
Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.
Just rip my heart out with a spoon!
Evan, 3 years old: "Go playground Dad."
Dad: "We can’t do that right now."
Evan, weeping: "Go playground Dad. Pleeease. Go playground. Go playground now. Goooo playground puleease."
Dad: "I’m sorry. I have to work."
Evan, hurt and mad: "I not play [with you] anymore!" and stomps away from Dad.
Some people have wolly worms or twitching toes to tell them what the weather will be. I have my wife! She’s down and out with a severe migraine right now. That means an extreme change in weather, usually a drop in pressure, so tonight it is going to snow, snow, SNOW! I only wish she could do this without having to suffer such pain.
The coffee is gone! The coffee is gone! Watch for riots in the streets! How could we have let all the coffee grounds run out.
Oh bean!
How I miss thee
Not long ago
I coddled thee
I’d shake your bag
Like a maraca
We’d laugh with glee
Then I’d give you a ride
The grinder it spun
To fine powder
Then a steam bath for you
While you drip dried
I’d have a drink
Now I thirst.
The house is 14.4°C right now. It was snowing today. Seems that the 3 year old has learned how to work the thermostat. I am now adding a digitally controlled, programmable, lockable thermostat to my wish list.
Temperature conversion by http://www.onlineconversion.com/
Wife ill. I have sent her to bed. Afternoon activities: program (finish a database audit trail system ie. track who makes all changes to the data, and finish a search engine), cook brownies for tonight’s Boy Scout Christmas party, pickup high school girls from school, buy ornament hooks from AC Moore so we can finish our advent calendar and let the children begin the Christmas countdown (aka this year daddy has his stroke). Maybe feed the children (which may involve a trip to the grocery) – there is some debate as to whether or not tonight’s Christmas party has real food (figure that out). Clean and prepare the children for tonight’s activity. And be kind to the wife and check on her to make her comfortable. That’s it.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tommy, back from college for 9 days: "Dad, is it normal to have all the skin on top of your foot just die?"
Sometimes you just can’t fight the current. I am desperately trying to produce some results for a client but now Amy is home so I’m refereeing the fights between Evan and Amy. Dinner tonight is pork roast and homemade mashed potatoes so I type a line of code and check the stove. Type a line of code, answer a question for Tommy ("When did the walls get painted?") Type a line of code, install a Firefox plugin I need for faster development (Firebug wasn’t on this machine).
This is not much different than working in a cube farm on a Friday before a holiday and having constant interruptions from fellow employees. It is a difficult way to work and far from ideal but if I remember to stay calm, not eat any children, and breathe, the work will get done.
