On the radio today I heard a commercial for the Obsidian Opera, with possibly the dumbest choice of words for promoting opera that I’ve ever heard. They said, “opera is like going to a topless bar for your eyes and ears.” Aside from the crude juxtapositioning of opera and topless bars, wouldn’t something that’s like a topless bar for your eyes and ears be… a topless bar?
Blog
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Blog software chart
For anyone looking at other weblogging software (Jake), this is really good: Blog Software Breakdown. It has a fantastic chart of features on ten popular weblog packages.
This chart displays attributes of different user-installed blog software packages side-by-side for comparison. Only server-installed scripts will be included in this list. (Sorry, no Radio, Blogger, etc.)
Via Ensight.
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Matrix Cheat Codes
At work today a couple of us were jokingly speculating as to what earlier versions of The Matrix would be like—or, more accurately, what we would imagine they’d be like—and I came up with Half-Life. Basically, imagine the Matrix v1 as a first-person shooter.
Makes perfect sense! All they essentially do in the Matrix is run around fighting, with or without weapons. Matrix Savants (or whatever the hell the people like Morpheus and Trinity are called) have managed to hack the command line and discover some cheat codes. But The One not only knows all the cheat codes, but is also able to change the server environment. Flying? Simply set
sv_gravity 0. -
Recipe: Graham cracker chicken
This is a recipe I came up with recently for my wife: Graham cracker chicken.
Ingredients (per chicken breast):
- 1 boneless, skinless chicken breast
- 3 squares of graham crackers
- 1 tsp. sugar
- ¼ tsp. salt
- Dash nutmeg
- 1 tbsp. yellow mustard
- 1 tsp. honey
- Dash lemon juice
- Drop of vanilla
- Optional: grated cheese (parmesan will do)
Directions: Mix the liquid ingredients together in a shallow dish. Crush the graham crackers and add the dry ingredients into a separate shallow dish. Dip the chicken breast into the liquid mixture, coating thoroughly, then bread completely with the graham cracker mix. Place on a greased shallow roating pan and put into a 350° oven. Bake at least 30 minutes.
Optional: Sprinkle with grated parmesan cheese before baking. Experiment with other ingredients; you can replace the yellow mustard and honey with 1 tbsp. honey mustard (duh!), for instance.
Enjoy!
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Random thoughts
Ever since someone at work talked about VH1‘s “50 Worst Rock Songs” special, with “We Built this City” as the number one worst, I’m having a hard time getting that song out of my head.
Why is it anymore that when Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has a celebrity guest star (which seems quite often these days), they’re predictably always the Main Bad Guy? (It’s getting stale!)
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Mystery beers
Part of getting ready to move next month is not only packing things up, but also disposing of excess homebrewed beer that’s been around for a while. And by “disposing of” I of course mean “drinking.” Some thoughts on these beers.
The oldest I have in the fridge right now is a porter I brewed way back in Spokane, about, oh, ’96 or ’97, I’m guessing—maybe earlier. I had named this “Capricorn Porter,” after my astrological sign. It was a big beer; I don’t remember everything I put into it, but I do remember licorice, and probably molasses, and a lot more. I was very ambitious and over-the-top with it, but it still turned out pretty good.
Eight years later, I had a sixpack left over and surprise, it’s still drinkable. Wouldn’t win any awards, but not terrible; it’s pretty astringent and you can taste the age. But this last sixpack held up better than I thought it would, considering it’s been through two moves and some questionable storage conditions.
This weekend I also drank the last bottle of a batch of Toad Spit Stout that I had kept for a few years. (I don’t remember if it’s left over from a batch I brewed right before leaving Spokane in 1997, or if I brewed a batch here in Bend since then.) It was pretty good, a little sharper in the roasted flavor than it should be when it’s fresh, but enjoyable. If ever there’s a signature beer I associate with Charlie Papazian and beginning homebrewing, it’s Toad Spit. It’s a classic, from The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. Maybe this will be the first batch of beer I brew when we get moved into the new house…
I also tried a small bottle of strawberry mead that I made for our wedding back in 1998. It has a bit of a kick to it; it’s very dry, with a mellow and at the same time lactic-sharp fruit bite to it. Not bad. And hardly any aftertaste, I thought, at all. A good sipping drink, I think, but I’m afraid of drinking too much in one sitting: mead aftereffects can be harsh.
And finally there’s some unknown ambery ale in a Grolsch bottle, and I can’t remember a thing about it. The fact it’s in a Grolsch bottle tells me it was probably a batch of beer I made for my parents (who had an abundance of those and whenever I would brew for them I’d use their bottles), but I’m totally blank on the details. A true mystery beer! I guess we’ll just have to wait and see…
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Bird
Ever had a bird get stuck in your chimney and get out via the fireplace? We did, tonight. (Although we have a wood stove and not a true fireplace.) How the bird got in the chimney, I don’t know; I imagine it must have fallen in, but I didn’t think birds were that clumsy. At any rate, it kept scratching and scraping around in the chimney pipe, and when I finally figured out how to open the flue between the stove and the chimney area, out pops this bird.
Before I could catch it (I was wearing gloves), it escaped and flew around the house for a few minutes before being herded out through the skylight. That was quite a sight. The other animals were quite excited (three cats and a dog); I suppose after years of watching birds taunt them through the windows this must have seemed like winning the lottery.
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MT Comment
What with the current brouhaha over Movable Type‘s licensing and payment scheme for the version 3 software (what, you want a link? Feh, go Google it), all I can really say is, damn it’s sure handy to have written my own system.
:)I notice that a lot of people are seriously considering migrating to WordPress. That’s cool, it uses PHP and seems pretty solid.
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Lewis and Clark
Today is (exactly) the 200th anniversary of the start of the Lewis and Clark expedition, on May 14, 1804. Did anyone realize this? I almost missed this entirely, but for Reuter’s Oddly Enough RSS feed: “Lewis and Clark’s List: Opium and ‘Portable Soup’” lists some of the provisions they took on their expedition, including opium, “portable soup” (“paste made of boiled-down beef and cow’s hooves, eggs and vegetables”), quills, inkstands, and 10 yards of linen.
Wikipedia has a decent start on an article on Lewis and Clark, but it needs fleshed out more.
Among other things, I seem to remember reading once that the Lewis and Clark expedition was one of the most successful such expeditions in history, because in a 28-month, cross-country trip they only lost one out of 33 members: Sergeant Charles Floyd died from acute appendicitis. Seems pretty good to me.
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Useless lists: Computer stuff
A co-worker who’s moving was telling me today about finding a dusty box in his attic that turned out to be an original Atari 2600, and for some reason that made me want to blog about it. Instead, this turned into a list of all the various computer and video game systems I own that I’ve accumulated through the years—all in the spirit of blogging useless lists (like I did the other day with the books left on my bookshelf).
It’s pretty geeky. And probably a little sad. Reading over the list, it highlights that I’m often behind the times when it comes to hardware. I’m retro-geeky. Read on if you dare.