Sunday, July 25, 2004
The Fun Begins
TV news in Boston is reporting that about a half hour ago there was a report from two “eyewitnesses” of four people allegedly parachuting onto the roof of the federal building, adjacent to the Fleet Center.
Within minutes, there was traffic on police radio indicating suspects in custody, seemingly affirming the allegation. Then the police backed off, and did not in fact have anyone. Federal and local security forces converged and built up to an even greater degree, and they are searching the area for signs of these parachuting marauders.
When Logan Airport was asked had their been any air traffic activity above that spot, they said there had been none. Sounds to me like a possible hoax, innocent, diversionary, or somewhere in between.
That’s all there is on it so far, via local TV news in Boston.
Update:
As of 8:00 AM the word is that it was a false alarm, and after an intensive search, nothing was found.
Another Fun Blog Feature
You’ve heard of Best of the Web? Well, now Ryan is introducing Worst of the Web. He’s relying on submissions, so be sure to check out that link for details.
Breaking the First Rule of Fight Club
Today I introduced Deb to the surreal yet excellent, blatently pre-9/11 film, Fight Club. That was some damn fine acting and amusing, this is not your every day, formulaic script, writing.
This was my third viewing, second on video. Much like The Sixth Sense, the surprise element of the plot is apparent in retrospect, and on subsequent viewings the cues jump out at you, waving arms and yelling for attention. I found that all the more so this time around.
I had forgotten the “this is Jack’s...” snippets from it, which is funny as I am sure I have seen or heard that used elsewhere - possibly on a blog - recently. “This is Jack’s medula oblongata.” “This is Jack’s pathetic Ecosystem ranking.”
I originally saw the movie with a friend who was amused with my obsessiveness over Iron Giant and the marketing idiocy shown with it. By way of poking fun at both me and the marketing folks who apparently never bothered to see the movie, he used to say “first rule of Iron Giant is you do not talk about Iron Giant.” Heh.
Can you imagine anyone trying to get funding to make Fight Club or something similar now? That’d be a feat.
Oh, Deb says she could have done without everyone smoking in the movie. She’s not distant enough from quitting yet to deal well with that. She also was more impressed with Meat Loaf than her existing impression had prepared her for. I liked him in Fight Club.
Last weekend I picked up some sadly missing culture from her by getting to know Bill and Ted. Party on, dudes.
Speaking of Babies…
I finally have pictures of the aforementioned grandniece, my third, who was born on the 22nd, a hefty 9 lb 2 oz, 21.5 inch bundle of what appears from this picture to be attitude. Or at least a desire to sleep without her picture being taken…
She’s so cute!
Getting there…
At Last Lucas Gets His “Revenge”
I happened to see somewhere last night that the name of Star Wars Episode 3 had been announced, and meant to mention it here. I was rather skittish, because I hadn’t seen it mentioned anywhere and thought the thing I read might not be for real.
Anyway, the title is Revenge of the Sith.
It’s a good one, not like Attack of the Clowns. It surprised me slightly, because I asked “what are the Sith getting revenge for?”
What it reminded me of was when the title of Revenge of the Jedi first floated around. Revenge, yes. It was a big deal, you know, waiting for the next Star Wars to come out. We loved finding out the next title and such.
But wait! Then word went forth it had changed. It was not to be revenge, but Return of the Jedi. “What!?” Some of us said. Nope, can’t use the word revenge. Too strong. Too unlike Jedi. Well, okay then.
So it comes full circle. Vengeance may not be the Jedi way. Probably leads to fear, hate, suffering, anger, that sort of thing. Right, Yoda? But hey, for the Sith it’s a natural.
I am almost starting to get excited about seeing the next one. I’d lost much of that, because I barely got excited about Episode 2, and didn’t think it was all that when I saw it in the theater the (unfortunately only) once. Combine that with Star Wars used to be the effects movies to watch, and now they’re just one part of a wonderfully large array of geek-satisfying output, add a dash of questioning how Lucas can pull of many hours of finishing what must be finished by the end of Episode 3 in a mere couple of hours, and it’s easy to be more apathtic than I once would have been.
Revenge, eh? Cool.
Saturday, July 24, 2004
Adventures In Cookery
I’m no Steve, but I was so pleased with the chicken experiment I made tonight, and Deb’s reaction to it, that when I went to the kitchen for seconds, I thought to take a picture. Had I been thinking, I would have done a nice presentation shot on the plate, served over rice with green beans and almonds on the side, when I first dished it up. Oh well. I also didn’t, as usual, measure, so I can’t give you a “recipe” as such. Here’s a closeup as it appeared in the pan when I went back to finish it off:
It’s vaguely like a sweer & sour, but it involves no peppers and comes out as a darker, thicker sauce than when my mother and sister used to make sweet & sour pork or chicken. Mainly I say that because the stuff tastes sweet, then has a kick to it.
Anyway, here is what I did, more or less. Ingredients:
2 rather large boneless chicken breasts out of the freezer, par-thawed
About 1/3 of a fairly large Vidalia onion, about equal to one small onion
Over half a stick of butter - berhaps 2/3 of one
About 4 oz of honey
A couple glugs of soy sauce
Sprinkling of roast garlic flake
A couple squirts of yellow mustard
Generous amount of garlic powder (under a teaspoon)
Really generous amount of powdered ginger (plus side of a teaspoon)
A couple dashes of cinnamon
Significant amount of brown sugar. I scooped out an intact lump and dumped it in, and the lump could have been a good half cup worth.
I used a covered, high-sided frying pan, though because I spent a lot of time letting it boil off, I didn’t keep it covered much of the time.
Chop up the onion into small bits. Throw the butter into the pan after turning heat on low to medium. As butter gets partway melted, throw in onion, swoosh around. Repeat as more melts, so butter mixes with the onion well. Turned heat lower as it settled in because I was behind on cutting the chicken and needed it not to burn.
My SOP with many things I’ve cooked would be to throw in some or all spices now and let them flavor the butter, which flavors the meat. I waited. Except the dash of roast garlic flakes, which I added early.
Cut the chicken into smallish chunks. I love kitchen shears. Never used them in my life until Deb picked some up. Tossed the chicken in the pan and turned the heat up to more like medium. Let it start to cook, covered. Started the rice water about this time. Stirred/turned it, let it cook a bit more, then started adding other ingredients.
I forget what order, except I added the powdered spices first, except for additional, adjustment amounts. I added the brown sugar (dark brown, but shouldn’t matter) last, except the couple glugs of soy sauce, which I almost forgot. I went light on the soy, for the sake of sodium consumption. It was far less than I would use in a batch of fried rice (which, since I often use leftover takeout Chinese soy sauce packets, I can tell you is 5-6 packets per cup of rice dry, compared to maybe 2 packets tops).
Obviously it’s cook, stir, cook, stir, uncover as needed, and raise heat as needed, to boil/simmer the sauce down.
As I cooked it, I was unsure of the smell. The mustard, little as it was, seemed to rule. Yet it tasted great. I ended up adding a smidge more cinnamon, another generous bit of ginger, a dash of garlic powder, and about an ounce more honey (reflected in the rough amounts I listed) after it got cooking along and tried evaluating by smell (misleading) and then taste. Your mileage may vary. It could probably be done just fine with less of each sweetening and spicing ingredient, long as the balance is there.
I could also see adding other ingredients or spices. I based it around what we had, which is limited. My inspiration was having looked at a General Gau’s/Tso’s Chicken recipe somewhere recently, and a Google search for recipe chicken honey garlic ginger, which led me to look at about three recipes with some of the same ingredients. Mostly I just have a fairly good sense of what will taste how together, and come from a family where people cook.
As mentioned, I served this over rice, with veggies on the side. The chicken breasts were big, and it made so much that a standard cup of rice dry was not quite enough to go with it. We could have fed three people on what it made, especially with more rice.
Deb loves that I cook too. We tend to split it about equally so far. It is soooo much better cooking for someone else too. It’s something I love to do, but when I was alone, I could hardly be bothered, and wouldn’t try to be as fancy or make as complete, balanced meals. Not that I am usually fancy. I get raves for plain old grilled, lightly seasoned chicken. I think that’s funny, and she in turn thinks it’s funny I love simple things she makes.
Not all my experiments turn out quite this yummy, but I have a decent record. I’ll have to keep better track next time so I can blog it more accurately if it’s good.
Never Been To Spain
Since I was under threat of pain if I burst out with any more rounds of “but I still have three purple hearts” or “this land will surely vote for me” or “this land was my land… but now it’s our land!” or “from kahl-eeee-forn-yuh, to the New York island whad ah do” and so forth, I started trying to find other songs to squeeze out the jibber jabber.
So I ended up with Three Dog Night’s Never Been To Spain busting loose from my lips regularly. Odd choice, I know. Probably because I recently titled a post based on a line from it.
Today in the shower, where, amazingly, I do not normally sing, I started going through other Three Dog Night songs. That led me to sing:
Joy to the world,
All the boys and girls,
Joy to the liberals at the DNC,
Joy to you and me
Heh. Rather than attempting to construct entire song lyrics inspired by the above snippet, I thought I’d simply toss it out there, where perhaps others would like to try their hand.
I also tried to cure myself of Never Been to Spain by firing up iTunes and playing it once I was out of the shower. While I have typed, that played, then, since it’s on random shuffle, the following other songs have played:
The Raspberries, Go All The Way
Huey Lewis, Do You Believe In Love
Herb Alpert, This Guy’s In Love
America, Daisy Jane
I figure my playlist always has potential to amuse or even excite some people, so it’s worth mentioning while I am at it.
Blogging In The Dark
I would probably have posted something sooner this morning, but after I got up, put on the coffeemaker, sat down with a glass of Livewire, and started poking around the blogroll, the power blinked off for a moment or two. Then it blinked off again. Then on immediately. Then off.
For around an hour.
Not a big surprise, considering it was one of the heavier rains I’ve ever seen, sounding like hail on the windows and flowing like a river down the road behind our house. Still a drag though. Luckily it came back before anything could thaw or spoil. Yay!
Friday, July 23, 2004
Julia May Ellis Arrives
My nephew’s wife has a site, kind of like a blog more or less, and her last words in the most recent entry were:
Are you listening Julia? It’s time to come out!!!
Well, she did, last night as it turns out. Weighing in at a hefty nine pounds. Ouch.
Yay! I have a third grandniece now. My daughter will have a first cousin once removed who was born the same year, just a couple months ahead of her. The first cousins, of whom I expect no more, range from 31 down to 2 years old this year. She’ll be very much the youngest. But I digress.
Welcome, Julia!
Nice Pictures
Via Tony, these Apollo pictures are fantastic. I had never looked at the previously released ones, so it makes no nevermind to me that a ton of them are freshly released. But hey, the more the merrier.
I love the inclusion of “inadvertent” shots. Every time I see the word inadvertent, I think of Sandy Berger. It’s an image completely out of place while cruising through space shots. Unless you consider him a space shot. But I digress.
Not Just for Catalan…
Can you imagine the popularity of a .CAT top level domain? At least, if it were made widely available the way domains like .TV, .NU and .CC have been.
I can see it now: a gutrumbles.cat parody site.
I’ll take “things I find disturbingly fascinating” for $1000, Alex
Via Lopsided Poopdeck, here, directing us here to the source post, we have an animated graphic of the effects of a 300 kiloton airburst over the Pentagon, including the resultant firestorm. And I don’t mean of protest.
If You Were President…
It would be interesting to see the answers to these questions from the mainstream candidates. For that matter, what would your answers be? Think of it as a blog meme. I don’t really have time to answer them meaningfully now, or I’d kick it off by doing so in this post.
Thursday, July 22, 2004
A brief commentary on my state of mind today:
What did the fish say when he ran into the wall?
Dam.
[Elvis] Thank you very much. [/Elvis]
Dodging Bullets
Oh. My. God.
I just came virtual inches from having to attempt a disaster recovery of Exchange Server 5.5 for my big client.
I feel very lucky today. And relieved! I managed to get the thing working again without having to setup a recovery server and attempt to import the data from the original server or tape. Since Exchange failed to backup last night and is why the Sybari Antigen activity log reports failed status for the night, recovery from tape would have lost a day or so.
Since the single largest reason for the problem is disk space running low on the C partition, that’s just one more reason to push them in the direction of a network infrastructure redo. Sooner rather than later. My target was next spring/summer, but it seems increasingly like the latest they might possibly be able to get away with waiting, rather than a target I’ll propose and they’ll try to go past. This is not the first server or function that has run into disk space or obsolescence as a source of trouble - well, and billable time - for me.
The mail server thing was compounded by the PDC having spontaneously rebooted and stopped at “press F1” earlier this afternoon.
Anyway, big sigh of relief here. Now back to other, neglected work.
How Unfortunate
One of my better known family tree members was Havelock Ellis (see also here and in Wikipedia).
He died in 1939, but not before writing an autobiography, published in 1940. The title? My Life.
I suppose it’s a pretty obvious autobio title, but really, couldn’t Bill Clinton have been just a tad more original?
Ah, that leads to a question… what do you think Clinton’s autobiography title should have been instead?
A Forest of Family Trees
La Shawn asks how deep is your family tree. It’s an excellent post on Roots and genealogy, made all the better by a vast number of fascinating comments in which people talk about what they know of their heritage.
One of these posts I should expand on my already lengthy comment over there. My mother is obsessive about genealogy, and is apparently on vacation in Maine right now doing just that while visiting a cousin.
The shortest version is that to the best of my knowledge my ancestry includes English, Scottish (those two are most of it), French (via Canadian), German, Irish, Dutch, and Wampanoag Indian.
Operation Give Shipping Problem Returns?
Well, well, well… Let’s hope this is nothing, but when Plunge says:
Damn, damn, damn. Be looking for a post tomorrow on the Chief’s site. Looks like legal action might be necessary at this point. Damn.
Guess we have to keep an eye on Chief Wiggles to see if more comes of it. The above quote and link is at Global Affairs where there was discussion of the mess originally.
Thanks to LissaKay for pointing this out in an update and via a comment to the original post here.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
[title withheld to be mysterious]
Jen has much to say about hats. Or something.
Document Sock
Eric’s Crocodile Rock parody is priceless.
Breck Girl
It’s funny. I intended to start a Googlebombing of sorts with Breck Girl pointing to the link you can see it points to. Nobody really picked up on that, but I did managed to become one of the top hits for Breck Girl. It generates a fair amount of traffic.
But damn, I’d still love to see the Googlebombing take off.
Adventures in Home Apartment Ownership Rentership
A few posts ago, my lovely wife mentioned our purchase of an air conditioner for the bedroom. Last night we went down the street to Home Dopes to look at them and some other stuff, and found they had a Maytag suitable for 150 square feet on sale for - get this - $55.
Wow! And since it’s a Maytag, of course it will never need repair.
I poked and prodded the contents and documentation last night, but decided to be confused in daylight instead. That way if the thing fell out of the window, several feet to the ground, I could see to pick up the pieces.
This morning I managed to get it installed, chastising the inanimate objects and documentation writers aloud as I went. They had me completely misdirected as to how things should go, and at one point I was convinced that they had not constructed the beast to go securely in our window at least.
Once it was in, looking like it belonged and had always been there, I turned it up full, closed the door and let it do its thing. Trial run to see how it would work.
Well, I have never had an air conditioner, but Deb is astonished by its efficiency. Full power will not be where it gets set most of the time. Later I turned it down and it seems to maintain easily. Helps that the room is small and seals tight.
While we were there, we continued the quest for a “drop light.” Wal-Mart didn’t have any. I was surprised. But wait… Home Dopes didn’t have any either!
In both places, I had to explain the term. A light at the end of a long cord. Usually with a metal or plastic shield. The dude in Wally World never heard of them, and assumed it had to be in automotive, because in my attempts to make his face less blank about what I sought, I noted that they are sometimes used to see to work under cars. I would have been better off to take another spin through hardware and electrical than to ask there.
Then at Home Dopes, the first guy I asked was ESL (actually, instead of second, I am fond of jokingly saying “English as a third language") and really could not help me. Had no idea what a drop light was, and no idea what I was saying when I described it, but he apparently felt safe to send me to the hardware section. There we found a guy who knew the term, but sounded like he didn’t at first because he needed to clarify. Apparently there is something else commonly called the same thing. He correctly pointed us back to electrical, which we had already been surprised to learn had none.
Weird.
The reason I need one is for the cellar. The back half has no lighting. I need to be able to see to rearrange things down there and better store my old junk. Plus it will light our laundry area better than it’s lit now, without having a good lamp of Deb’s down there. The lamp is needed elsewhere.
The search will go on.
Finally, we also looked at ceiling fans while we were at Home Dopes. In the “dining room” of the apartment, which is now our living room, the ceiling light fixture is dead. Has been for weeks. Something shorted out, and the landlord hadn’t gotten around to fixing it yet after he came and checked it out initially.
I was thinking that a ceiling fan would be nice, and would work well given the eight foot ceilings. That particular room, especially the way we are using it, isn’t the easiest to keep cool and breezy. It has a folding door directly into the kitchen, as well as one into the hall. We have closed the folding doors to make more room, blocking that side with the TV, and the other side with the microwave to provide greater useful space in the kitchen. Makes for less airflow.
So I asked the landlord if we bought a ceiling fan, would he install it. We’d plan to leave it here when we eventually move. There was some initial confusion. He thought we meant the traditional living room, which is our computer room, and which has no ceiling light fixture. Thus my surprise when he said we would have to pay the guy to mount it, and which would probably be about $60, but if the ceiling couldn’t support it unmodified, might be $200. Once we all got on the same page, especially with the light the fan would replace needing fixing anyway, it was a different story. The only remaining confusion was when the electrician though we already had the fan and was all eager to come on down.
We managed to find a pretty nice, 5-blade, reversible fan and 3-bulb lamp, on sale for $50 on special bonus clearance for $40. Woohoo! Now I just have to open it, make sure it’s all there and unbroken, do any preliminary assembly that will speed installation, and arrange for the electrician to swing by. That’ll be nice.
There Can Be Only One
Accept no substitute. PoliBlog rules. It’s one of my favorite handful of blogs with good reason.
Google exists, people. It’s rude at best to jump into the blogging game and use a non-unique name. It’s not like they used something like PoliBlogPop that is similar, yet different. It’s the same name, and essentially the same focus. Sheesh.
And yes, even way back when I did a quick check to see if anyone else was using or blogging as Jay Solo, or using Jay Solo’s Verbosity, and I most certainly checked before using Accidental Verbosity. If nothing else, it’s to my benefit to be uniquely named and findable.
No Mr. Terrorist, I Expect You To Die
I see my post asking who’s with me has become especially timely today.
No appeasement. No cooperation. No ransom. Nothing but hot, fiery death as soon as it can be meted out.
I Am In Love
With Jenna Bush, of course.
She’s not only hot, but also terribly cute and funny.
Happy Birthday
Maddy and Amanda are - gasp! - teenagers now.
Update:
My wife pointed out that it’s Patrick’s birthday too! But he’s more than thirteen. Lots more. Lucky for him though, not as much more as me.
Greatest Accomplishment?
I meant and forgot to do an anniversary post yesterday, but Annika had a nice one that covers it just fine. What do you think; greatest directed accomplishment in human history?
This is one of those things that dates me, even compared to people just a few years younger. Saw the first lunar landing. Watched Star Trek when it originally aired. Those are “you’re old!” kinds of things to be able to claim now.
Save The Saturn
They’re collecting donations toward restoration of the beached Saturn V at JSC. There are some good pictures at the link. When I visited the place around 15 years ago, I was totally blown away by the Saturn, even as I was saddened to see it as a lawn-based museum piece.
Honest
We all make honest mistakes. Even Chuck. Or is that especially Chuck?