Three Things I Learned Today

This was inspired by Arya’s training to be an assassin in A Song of Ice and Fire. I’m tempted to publish it online somewhere, but that also seems kind of vain. Does anyone really care what I learned today? I guess I'll find out if anyone comments.

July 15 2011

• Alan Verasko now claims he is working for his father and was underpaid for his work on the crawlspace.
• [jobnumber];l[linenumber] displays a page at a time when viewing Tandem spooler output.
• http://wallbase.cc/start/ is a great place to look for interesting digital images.

July 16 2011

• Inverted round maile becomes much more stable when you trap rings in it every so often.
• Nurse Naniko is really only worth watching for the fan service scenes.
• In the Philipines, a fat gecko might fetch over $1000 for use in folk medicine.

July 17 2011

• Michael Pollan has a variety of tomato named after him.
• The “side” of my crawlspace facing the back yard is pretty flimsy.
• Zooey Deschanel sings in the new Winnie the Pooh movie.

July 18 2011

• British PM wants to convene a special sitting of Parliament on Wed July 20 to issue a statement about the phone hacking scandal.
• Clarks are having their last swim meet of the summer tonight.
• Apparently it’s not only annoying that my gutters didn’t get put back up, it’s against the law.

July 19 2011

• Cornell physicists have demonstrated a temporal cloak, which can hide short duration events from the rest of the universe. (Short is currently 110 nano seconds.)
• Somewhere between 2 and 15% of women have an extra type of cone in their eyes for detecting colors.
• The band Vampire Weekend was sued over their use of the photo on the album Contra.

July 20 2011

• Google can detect one particular type of malware that intercepts google results and warn infected users.
• Borders liquidating all stores. :-(
• The Latin word for meat really means the meat of mammals and birds, which is why Catholics can eat fish on Friday. (Along with amphibians, reptiles, and insects.)

July 21 2011

• Lytro is making a camera that captures enough spatial information to refocus the image at different points after the shot is taken.
• Rhubarb is very sour, kind of like a sweet tart without the sweet. (Unless you dip it in sugar first.)
• There is still extensive road construction on 71N in Northern KY.

July 22 2011

• Oracle and Google are in court over use of Java in Android phones.
• There was a terror attack in Norway
• The left hand keyboard part of Break on Through is the rhythm and the right hand part tracks the lyrics.

July 23 2011

• Celuose Gum is another term for wood pulp in a food label.
• You can get a pretty good photo of a helicoptor at 300mm zoom.
• Amy Winehouse was found dead today in London.

July 24 2011

• Parent’s AC went out.
• Getting off at exit 191 is a good way to get to Dan’s house in the event of bad traffic on 71/75 S.
• Tilted Kilt’s Boddington’s is now functional.

July 25 2011

• Parent’s replaced their AC with Bryant. (Same company that tried to sell the Fritsches on new units when they didn’t need them.)
• I’ll be shooting pool with Stephen, Bobby, and Katy on Sundays at Bank Shot.
• WASPI is an open source security project.

July 26 2011

• It was a neighbor who complained about the weeds in my yard.
• Drilling into masonry by eye to try to match previous holes is a bad idea.
• The plastic things for attaching downspouts to the house must come in at least 2 different sizes. (Maybe I should have stuck to aluminium bands, but the one on the left front of the house worked so well.)

July 27

• Courtny Farms discontinuing A la carte program (too error prone and time consuming)
• Gallup poll shows congressional approval rating lowest ever recorded.
• Running a gcc compiler on AIX might be a short term solution, but is hardly ideal since the default AIX make command doesn’t understand gcc make files.

Five Movies that Have Very Little in Common

The last five movies I've seen, working forward are:

Monsters Inc. - The first time I saw it, I thought it was good, but a little sub-par for Pixar. However, watching it a second time with Blake and Regan I've decided that Pixar has nothing to be ashamed of in this film.

Kung Fu Hustle - If you don't like martial arts movies, you should stay away. However, if you do like martial arts movies you really need to check this out. The escalating weirdness straddles the line between humor and action without ever loosing its balance.

Green Lantern - Somehow they spent $200 million making this. I thought CGI had gotten cheaper. Anyway, a decent superhero flick, but if you've got a HDTV and a surround sound, you can certainly wait for the bluray.

X-Men first class - There's a lot to like here. I think there maybe should have been one fewer mutant on each side of the battle. Also, I looked up some of the characters, and the ones whose powers I thought I had seen before were relatives of those characters from earlier movies. I thought the payoff at the end of the film was the best part of the movie, and since I think the hardest thing to do when telling a story is to end it well, I think that's high praise.

Black Swan - The was without a doubt an interesting and well made film. However, the story is only shown through the eyes of one character, and you can't always trust what you see. The one thing I had heard from everyone I knew who had seen it was that it was disturbing, but it didn't really bother me. I might watch it again to see how things seen now that I know how it goes.

Rye Bread

Rye Bread without caraway seeds is like Batman without Robin. Well, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight both did just fine without Robin.

Steak without potatoes. (Why does the plural of potato need an "es"?) Actually, steak is pretty tasty on its own. Sure, it's better with a potato, but it's still steak without one.

Barbie and Ken. That's no good. Toy Story III revealed that Ken is narcissistic and treacherous.

The point is, rye bread, even if it's made with 100% whole grain rye, isn't going to taste like rye bread without caraway seeds. Why is this the case? I don't know, but having made a loaf of rye bread without caraway seeds, I know it to be true.

I made a batch with caraway seeds this week, and it turned out to be one of the better breads I've baked. I'm wondering if it was because I was being too inconsistent with my treatment of my bread starter my first time around. I would feed it, then rush it back to the fridge as soon as I had made the dough. This time around I've been leaving the starter out for a full 24 hours to let the microbes really work before making dough.

I've also been trying to be more scientific in how long I give the stand mixer to use the bread hook on the dough. 4 minutes from the time the ingredients start to pull away from the side of the bowl seems to be working well. The texture of the last few loaves I've made had been very good.

At any rate, I even attempted a marbled rye this week. I mixed half the dough with 1/3 rye and the other half with 2/3 rye. The color difference was most noticible when it was first out of the oven, so I think I would save this for special ocasions. However it's nice to know that works.

Bacon without eggs...oh I give up.

Existential Sushi

Yesterday, a coworker came back from lunch talking about the happy roll, and how it had made her happy. That's when I realized that if I ever opened a sushi restaurant, I would go the opposite direction: Existential Sushi. The menu almost develops itself. The malaise roll, the boredom roll, the ennui roll, the futility roll.

Now, what actually goes into one of these rolls? Who knows, we're talking marketing at this point, not production. Additionally, decorating would be easy too. Just take some public domain images of famous essentialists, Camus, Heidegger, Sartre, and Photoshop (well Gimp, I prefer open source) in some sushi! A simple but effective way to merge the two pillars of the endevor into a common image.

Speaking of Jean-Paul Sartre, there would have to be a nausea roll, but even with this strongly themed menu, that might not be a big seller. But it did remind me of a story I was told of an unfortunate attempt to get someone to try sushi for the first time which resulted in projectile vomiting. The story was told, ironicly enough, at a sushi restaurant, so maybe this idea of an existential sushi has been bubbling up through my subsconscious for a while now just waiting for the correct overt triggers.

So there it is, my idea for a restaurant should I ever want to give up on computer programming. No stealing!

The Craft, Dog, and the Tipping Point

I went to Dayton for the first time since Feb, and had a good trip. I got caught in traffic Saturday morning heading up, but I left early enough that it was probably a wash between heading straight up 71/75 and taking 275 around. That road is a complete mess right now. They've got it torn up to the point that you can only use one lane, and even that gets blocked sometimes to let construction equipment onto the road. On the drive I listened to The Tipping Point, and that book is really fascinating. For example, if you want to found your own army, organize the men into fighting units of no more than 150 men, otherwise you'll have discipline problems.

Suzanne and Jon have been watching episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter, and that's interesting for different reasons. I would have never guessed at how much help they get from the friends of the fugitive. The "wisdom" of Dog is usually enough to make you laugh more than once an episode, so the show is pretty easy to watch. I took pictures of Abby, and I think I converted Suzanne to Gimp over Photoshop. (Gimp does have the advantage of being free.) I even learned about the red eye reduction tool when Suzanne asked about it. I haven't been zapping red eye in my photo editing, but I guess I don't have an excuse not to now.

Chip and I completed a minor woodworking project; I needed a new flap to cover the crawlspace on an addition to my house. I wanted something more sophisticated than a sheet of plywood, and the final result ended up looking almost impressive. Now I just need to get it painted and put in place. We also watched The Craft, yes it's kind of cheesy, but it's also the style of movie I enjoy. It kind of freaked me out how much Robin Tunney http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000677/ looks like Kristen Stewart http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0829576/. It's really surprising that I had never seen that before. Also ironic was the use of of the theme song from Charmed in this movie. (However, since this movie predates Charmed by 2 years, it would be more accurate to say that it's ironic that Charmed picked a song used in this movie for their theme song.)

Finally, I stopped by Michele and Dan's on the way home. Karina was completely wild. I did get to see Ethan take 2 steps. (One step on 2 different occasions.) She introduced Ethan after Thomas and Percy the trains and a toy airplane, however, that's more credit than he usually gets from Karina. She probably spent a good half an hour or more spinning in circles and talking about the need to spin faster and faster in musical terms. She also told me Pluto is a dwarf planet and repeatedly made use of the word Gondola as a synonym for boat.

What if the Lord of the Rings movies had been cast like Tarintino films?

I first thought of what the movies would have been like if Samuel L. Jackson had been given the role of Gandalf.

Gandalf [facing the balrog]: You shall not pass mother...

So (not that the Tolkein estate would ever allow a travesty like this to come to pass) here's my casting proposal:

Gandalf: Samuel L Jackson
Saruman: Ving Rhames
Elrond: Christopher Walken
Galadriel: Uma Thurman
Aragorn: Bruce Willis
Boromir: John Travolta
Legolas: Brad Pitt
Gimli: Kurt Russel
Eomer: Tim Roth
Eowyn: Daryl Hannah
Faramir: Michael Madsen
Denethor: Harvey Keitel
Arwen: Rose McGowan

Priceless gem found while cleaning up last night

Lest anyone start casing my house and contacting disreputable pawn brokers, the gem in question is a TV preview DVD put out by Warner Brothers for the fall 2005 season. What makes this so priceless, well I'll get to that. Caroline made the good call to check out the contents.

• Close to Home - Looks like a Cold Case variant, except the main character is trying to solve suburban crimes. Looked bland but tolerable. Wait, this aired on CBS??
• E-ring - Starred the late Dennis Hopper, probably the best thing it had going for it. Plot was something about how the people working in a certain section of the Pentagon protect the world. What's going on here, this show aired on NBC???
• Freddie - Irresponsible guy tracks his family down and has his sister & grandmother mother move in with him. Caroline actually saw this in Costa Rica, I may vaguely remember adds for this from '05, but it looked really bad. This aired on ABC, what's going on at the WB's marketing department????
• Hot Properties - I don't think the term cougar had made it into widespread use yet, but that's the only recollection I have of this preview, and I just watched it last night. What in the world, this aired on ABC too????? (Surely the next show will be a WB show.)
• Invasion - I actually remember the ads for this. Aliens take advantage of a hurricane to body snatch a local woman and the only people who notice are her young daughter and a couple of crackpots. I don't think the show lasted long, and it's...another ABC offering??????
• Supernatural - Finally, I know this is a WB show, I've heard of and remember the previews for. I've only ever watched one episode, but this may be the only show on the disc that didn't die a quick and overlooked death.
• Reunion - The gimick, a bunch of perfect looking friends turn out to be not so perfect. You find out how one year at a time. I bet the makeup department was sweating that one, fortunately, I don't think they had to worry about that for long. #*&^%& this is a Fox show!!!!
• Related - Looks like an attempt to recreate friends, except instead of 6 friends you have 4 sisters. I think I remember ads for this back in the day too. Finally another WB show.
• Just Legal - The only person an 18 year old who has already passed the bar can get to hire him is a burned out drunk of a lawyer. I remember the ads for this one too, but I don't think it lasted long either. At least is was another WB show.
• Twins - It had one of the Rosanne kids on it, and oh my, did it look awful!!! It's a WB show, but wow, who in the world ever green lit this. The Rosanne kid is the smart responsible one running the family business, and her twin is blonde and vapid. Oh yeah, Melanie Griffith is the mom after she looks all weird from too much plastic surgery. It's another WB show, but maybe they should have left this one out.
• The War at Home - I've actually seen an episode or two of this. It wasn't bad, and it might have lasted for more than a season, but it's a Fox show. What's up with this WB promo??????

Seriously Warner Brothers, you put out a fall preview disc, and only 4 of the 11 previews are your own shows. what were you thinking???? I don't even remember how this ended up in my possesion, but 5 and a half years later, it provided quite a bit of unintended comedy.