jaggedmonkey.com

I just saw this site: MiLife Times.

It took me several reads to realize it was not the MILF Times.

Then I quickly lost interest.

Some other random smoker outside the bar posited that the new cigarette ban is an insidious form of eugenics.

He hits on a girl for a while, eventually has to go smoke, and some nonsmoker moves in to entertain her. Thus breeding a new addiction free group of children.

I knew the non-smokers were up to something.

Obviously, they're ignoring that one could ask a girl "hey, want to go out for a cigarette?" But they're clearly only politically savvy, not biology savvy.


Also amusingly, I was pondering linking to Wikipedia's entry for "Evolution", but when I pulled it up, it contained the text of Genesis 1. (It has since been reverted.)

Once I brought warm weather and happiness when I travelled. Now it's cold and snow. Drove through a snowstorm on what was either the open right lane of I-94, or simply well-packed snow, to get here. But once I hit Indiana, the snow was gone. Or so I thought.

Dashboard has an accumulating snow icon I've never seen before:



Brr.

Random Fact 24
The city is fundamentally not that much different than Champaign if you multiplied its physical area by 10. Its huge and sprawling, and they've accommodated for this with 4 and 5 lane roads everywhere. Ultimately, it takes you just as long to get places in Champaign as Lansing -- Champaign because the city planners are actually escaped mental patients, Lansing because things are actually far away.

Random Fact 25
The people aren't much different either. You cross the border into Wisconsin and suddenly people have funny accents. More so once you cross again into Minnesota. Here, everybody sounds just like everybody in Central Illinois. It's very odd. The only real differences I notice are the color of the University sweatshirts, the lack of import cars, and overall better beer.

Random Fact 6
The big coffee chain here is Beaner's. It sounds like you'd walk in and get affronted by hispanic gang members. "Eh, esse, whachu wanna drink, mang?" Instead, it's white, middle class college students with a similarly confusing slang. Upon ordering a hot chocolate, you will be delivered a "Grande Cocoa Carmella Skinny Skinny." I believe the language, like Creole, grew out of a melting pot of other languages, and it is difficult to understand for a native English speaker. Fortunately, I rely on the nonverbal clues and body language (such as the cynical college student "this should be obvious that this is your order, idiot" eyes-rolling stare) to complete my transaction. I have made it my mission to tutor the Beaners in the English Language.

Random Fact 9
The big property firm is Villaluakas, or Villa-Something Else Greek, I'm not sure what. There are signs for these guys all over, and I wouldn't notice except that it reminds me of "Villa Villakula", which was a compilation album from a decade ago that I loved before it was destroyed by scratches and other assorted neglect. But every time I see the sign, the Sleater-Kinney song from that CD pops into my head.

The name of the song is "You Ain't It!" And with it stuck in my head all the time, it makes me wonder if I am in fact not "it", although I'm not sure what that means exactly.

My yesterday consisted of trying to go as fast as possible through rain, snow, right-lane-hogging drivers, spilling pop all over myself and a detour to a brewery in Indiana to be told that I can't buy carryout on Sundays.

But I'm back in Michigan. It's so different - so quiet. Silence punctuated by an occasional siren. No diners milling about outside, no drunks wandering from bar to bar, no bums asking me for two dollars, no coworkers.

It looks like my next week is going to be filled with meetings, and hopefully getting some code written around them. We've been asked to shoehorn our product into Xcode, which is most unhelpful about any product but the three they've decided to support. This has all the signs of being an unfun week.

Lesson One
Comcast believes that Monday Morning is a completely appropriate time to take their cable modem service down for several hours.

Lesson Two
The "internet cafe" both has poor internet and coffee.

--- www.l.google.com ping statistics ---
135 packets transmitted, 122 packets received, 9% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 17.933/289.405/604.104/129.028 ms

Yes, Alton, I did happen to catch about 5 minutes of your show, Good Eats tonight.

Turns out that you were suggesting that the best electric pepper grinder is... yeah, a pepper mill with the shaft shoved into a chuckless drill.

I gave you the benefit of the doubt, maybe I had fallen asleep in front of the TV one night, and absorbed this idea through osmosis...

But no, it's original air date was tonight. Meaning it aired two months after I suggested it.

Surely a calculus type thing -- simultaneous independ discovery and all that -- but I'm going to continue to take credit for it.

Sincerely,
Ed, Kitchen Hacker

Come have a drink at the ol' Mike & Molly's this Saturday, say 9ish. Break a bottle of Champagne over my bow!

Nothing matters when we're dancing...

Thirteen months ago, I couldn't wait to leave town. Job apps in NY, Chicago, and especially Portland. A planned trip to post-Katrina New Orleans. And, of course, I stayed. And out of something so terrible -- my grandpa passing unexpectedly -- grew a great love, a great job, a great life.

The idea of leaving hadn't really occured to me. It's too easy, too comfortable. I wake up, walk out the door, and arrive at work. I walk the other way to myriad restaurants and bars. And then I go back home to my comfortable little loft.

Except that the loft has grown cold. The girl has moved on, away from UIUC and to a fellowship at MSU.

And so I'll follow.

I'm leaving in two weeks to go to Lansing, Michigan. The paradoxical home of prohibition and microbreweries, education and low tech business. My boss has generously allowed me to work from home -- but I'll be back in the office (and thus, Champaign) once a month.

I'm simultaneously terrified and excited. What if I hate it? If I'm too much a pussy to survive outside Champaign? If I can't stand never seeing my coworkers? But I've got to try. Despite the Michigan winters, the strange lack of good food, and the fact that it's ridiculously outside my comfort zone, I think it will be good.

I'll miss it here, of course. My friends, my family. The warm glow from behind the bar at Mike & Molly's. The lovely food coming out of Bacaro's kitchen. But this is too good an opportunity not to take.

So, see ya Champaign. You've been good, you've been bad. But let's go have a beer next weekend before I leave?

I was just informed by Shaw that I went to school with Ling-Ling from "Drawn Together".

I don't remember her. But then, I didn't hang out with the ESL kids.

Okay, it's not the Tivo's fault. It's Insight's. And not really even theirs. I came home secure in the knowledge that I would have a Family Guy and Futurama to watch after having a few drinks at the M&M's.

But no. I have been denied easy access to cartoons. I have to (shock, horror) put in a DVD.

What is this world coming to?

For some reason or another, we couldn't make international calls on our fancy new PRI with our somewhat new phone system. This was, it turned out, Our Fault. But in the forty manhours it took to resolve, I learned a lot about AT&T. Their DMS-100s are touchy about interpreting dialed numbers, AT&T (local) can't communicate with AT&T (Long Distance), and that Doug from AT&T Hicap prefers the old (SBC) web pages as opposed to the new (AT&T) ones because:

"... you can get all the same information faster and with fewer clicks. I don't need my login and pin number to find the same information that you can get in the phone book. You know, newer isn't necessarily better. It's like some people would say the car is a newer version of the horse. You know, maybe it's better because you can get places faster. But really, it's dumping out tons of pollution and increasing global warming. If global warming actually exists. Which maybe it doesn't. But the waste that comes out of a horse isn't bad, just a little bit smelly.

"You know, I own a horse, and the only thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't have USB."

Tomorrow, maybe I can resolve the other two open tickets. Please, please, someone kill me, for I am in phone company trouble ticket hell.

"Your hard drive died because you touch yourself at night." (Troy)

When one needs to grate loads of pepper for various barbequeing... (dry rubs, marinades, ingredients....) and one lacks a spice grinder (or even a coffee grinder), one is advised to remove the head of one's pepper grinder, and insert the shaft into one's chuckless drill. Viola. A poor man's powered pepper grinder.

"I think Israel's right in this.... I dated a Lebanese girl once, I'd want to bomb them too."

Asked of me by another smoker in the building:

Where do you work in this building that you get to dress like that every day?

Since we dubbed Memorial Day as barbeque day, we needed a different name for July 4th. Thus, barbeque (and other) day.

Mmm, barbeque. Mmm, other.

The highlight of yesterday's food orgy was Troy's carolina-style pulled pork. But my rib tips weren't bad, if I do say so, with my born-of-necessity chipotle and Guinness barbeque sauce. (What do I have laying around? Guinness? Check. Chipotle? Check. Ketchup? Check. That's a barbeque sauce.)

Sweat a small onion and half a head of garlic in olive oil. Add a cup of brown sugar, until it melts up. Add 1/4 cup of molasses, a few shakes of worcestershire, two cups of cider vinegar and most of a can of Guinness. (All that you haven't drank by now.)

Chop up the peppers from a small can of chipotle en adobo. Add (with adobo.) Simmer until reduced by a whole lot (or, really, until you're already late for the cookout you're supposed to be at.) Strain, add most of a 28oz bottle of ketchup to cool it off.

Very dark, very spicy. I likes it, conservatively, on my rib tips.

I have forsaken LiveJournal as of late. That's mostly because I've been actually busy with stuff, and I forked off my nerdy writing over to a techie sort of blog. So I'm writing a lot over here. It's mostly geeky stuff, which I've been doing a lot of lately.

I have undertaken a new experiment, which involved acrylic and canvas (though I'm loathe to actually call what I'm doing "painting") so there will probably be updates here eventually.

1.0 has been released.

Time for lunch, and a beer, and to revel in the the mighty Build 1275.