Kevin Lawver's blog about life, programming, culture and learning.
I loved the old Geekery. It was butt ugly. Last night and (just a little) today, I put the done-enough-to-show-it touches on the new place for my wild Geek Ramblings: Geekout!
Let me know what you think. I’m gonna try to find the tutorial and tip things I posted here and copy them over. It’s all Movable Type-errific, so it should be much easier to update (ok, it means I’ll probably update it – static HTML is pretty easy too).
Ok, why am I the number one and two result for TylenolPM? I don’t take it very often, really. I swear!!
I really don’t want to drive home tonight. The driving morons will be out driving like the roads a normal. They’ll honk their horns as a mating call to the other jackasses on the road and only serve to raise my already too high blood pressure. This would have been the perfect week to take a vacation to a small island in the Caribbean where they provide you with hammocks, fruity drinks with little umbrellas and complimentary flip flops. Alas, I’m here, in the snow, dreading the thought of packing up and getting in my car.
And how was your day?
I’m a ball of pain today. My left shoulder and lower back are screaming at me above the soothing tones of Ibuprofen. Stupid snow. Our street hasn’t been plowed since Sunday afternoon. This morning, it was an ice-covered deathtrap riddled with five-foot tall mounds of snow and cars parked in the middle of the street, blocking all traffic in both directions, causing backing up into empty spots, spinning tires and much sailor-swearing. I made it into work, but the main roads aren’t much better. While the road surface is clear, VDOT decided to plow only 1.5 lanes instead of both. The road randomly narrows to one lane. Turn lanes are dimples. Combine the two, and you have a thirty minute sit-n-spin to go a mile and a half. I understand clearing snow is a pain, but come on!! VDOT’s turned the roads in the area into a rollerball arena.
In other news, I couldn’t get to sleep last night, so I watched this documentary I TiVo’ed called The Truth About Gay Animals. I can’t find it on Trio’s schedule, so you may be out of luck if you want to see it. It was an interesting and funny search by comedian Scott Capurro for naturally occuring homosexuality in the animal kingdom. Now, it wasn’t exhaustive, but he did talk to a scientist doing a study on sheep that was compelling. If you have the chance to catch it, check it out. It’s entertaining even if it’s not totally enlightening.
I’m trying to get back into the swing of working at work. There’s no TV to distract and entertain me (did you know Sci-Fi’s playing Battlestar Gallactica from 11am-4pm every weekday?!), just work. I’ve already done a bunch, but can feel myself running out of steam… just like this post.
I am a cooking machine. Thanks to Molto Mario, I’ve been experimenting the past couple nights with new and crazy non-recipe based dishes. For example, last night I made pounded chicken breasts rolled with fresh mozarella and fresh basil in a diced tomato sauce over vermicelli. Man, was it good. I flattened the chicken breasts by repeatedly walloping them with a rolling pin. Then, I put a fresh mozzarella ball, ripped in half, and one basil leaf on each breast, and then rolled them up. I fastened the end down with two toothpicks. I then heated up a quarter cup of olive oil (whatever covers the bottom of the pan) under meadium-high heat. Once the oil was hot (it dimples a little on the surface when it’s ready). I used tongs to drop the chicken rolls in. I browned them on all sides, then turned the heat down to medium to simmer the rolls for another fifteen minutes. After I thought they were almost done, I took them out of the pan and set them aside. I then threw in one diced onion (it was small, you might want to use half of a large one), and two sliced garlic cloves. Once the onions were brown at the edges and translucent, I poured in a can of diced tomatoes. I let that cook down for a little while, then put the chicken rolls back in. I let this melange simmer for ten minutes until the pasta was done. I again removed the rolls from the sauce, drained the pasta and then threw the pasta into the pan with the sauce and tossed it with a couple ripped up fresh basil leaves. Voila, yummy yummy.
Tonight, I wasn’t in the mood for reheated chicken stew, so I grabbed some boneless pork chops from the freezer, defrosted and then (again) pounded the hell out of of them with the rolling pin. I think they were still slightly frozen, so they didn’t get as flat as I wanted, but hey, that’s OK. I then cracked two eggs into a bowl, whipped them up and set them aside. I then poured half a cup of flour into another bowl and mixed in the following: bunches of cayenne pepper, green chili powder (you could substitute curry and cumin), black pepper and some salt.
I dragged the pork chops through the eggs and then through the flour – both sides – lightly covering it. Then, I dropped them into the same amount of heated olive oil I used on the chicken. I let it sit on one side for about ten minutes to get it nice and brown, then flipped them and let them sit for ten minutes on the raw side. I flipped it again, letting it sit on each side for seven more minutes. The chops were just perfect. They were crunchy on the outside, juicy and tender on the inside and yum-tastic.
This Saturday, they’re having a chili cook-off at church. I’m planning on making sirloin chili. I can’t wait to get started. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Thanks to the UPS guy who couldn’t get around me and my burly next door neighbor, my truck is back in its spot. Ahead of me is a bunch of shovelling, back pain and swearing. I mean lots and lots of swearing. Sailor-scale swearing. Stubbed your little toe on the dresser swearing. Yeah, that much. I mean, I’m from Tucson, Arizona. We don’t get two feet of snow. Stupid snow.
I tried to go to work today. Already, this doesn’t sound good, does it? I backed up in 4-Wheel Low and hit the wall created by the plow. I figured I could easily go over it. Little did I realize that the wall’s pretty much solid ice. Now my truck is stuck half in the street, half out. The tires are stuck in wells of ice created by repeated attempts to back up, or go forward back into the spot. Two hours of shovelling out the ice that’s jammed under my rear axle, and I’m still stuck with no traction. A friend is going to Costco to buy sand and/or kitty litter to see if that helps. Yeah… I’m stuck.
But, in the one piece of good news, the pictures are up from our snow day.
I had one of those “oh yeah” moments today. See, I drive an SUV. It’s not a huge truck (’97 Chevy Blazer), but it is an SUV that gets less than 25 miles to the gallon. I’ve been feeling guilty recently with all the “oil pays for terrorism” rhetoric around. But, today, I remembered why I have it. Ok, I have it because I’ve got long legs and I hate driving normal cars. They’re completely uncomfortable. I test drove everything under the sun, and the Blazer was the only thing that fit like a glove.
Sorry, back to my “oh yeah” moment. I went out today to shovel the truck out so I could get to work tomorrrow. My two next door neighbors were out there shovelling their sensible four door sedans and looking rather hopeless that they’ll be able to get their cars out tomorrow. Well, after fifteen minutes of shovelling, I got tired of dealing with it, and decided to give it a try and see if I could get out of my parking spot. So, I jumped in, fired it up, put it into reverse, then into 4-WD Low (mmmm, torque) and dropped my foot onto the pedal. I was obviously a little skittish and didn’t want to spin the tires too much, so I took it easy. Surprisingly, it wasn’t hard at all. 10 seconds, and boom, I was out of my spot. I pulled back in, hopped out and smiled at my neighbors and beamed, “Thank God for four wheel drive.”
So, I’ll live with my contribution to global warming. I can get out in the elements if I have to. “Oh yeah”, that’s why I have an SUV.
Defective Yeti has the best of all possible possible endings for Joe Millionaire. I won’t be watching the final episode unless Jen makes me, but I would almost watch if they could guarantee and ending half as good as the one laid out by the Yeti.
Rebuilding 900+ Movable Type entries takes forever. The 2.6 upgrade went well. I usually download the full-library one just to get everything. This time though, they didn’t include the upgrade scripts. So, nothing worked when I tried it. I figured the missing upgrade scripts were the problem. So, download the upgrade, run mt-upgrade26.cgi and ::poof::, everything’s swell and we’re rebuilding everything.
Today’s been fun. We were looking out the window every five minutes checking to make sure the snow was still falling down. I checked my mail frequently for that magic note that work was close (it came… wooo-hoooo… couch, tv, surfin’ and workin’ in my jammies tomorrow).
Jen and I are watching High School Reunion. It’s pretty sad, when you get right down to it. It just shows how little people change between high school graduation and death. All of the people on the show have the same issues they had in high school. I don’t want to go to either of my high school reunions. I hope they won’t even find me. Oh wait, I’m extremely Google-able. Crap, why didn’t I think about that before? Stupid, stupid Kevin.