31 July 2016

Elementary had two interesting references in episodes one and two.  One showed a hardcover of On Security by Bruce Schneier, which is his blog not a book.  On episode two, Holmes referenced this study from Belgium.

30 July 2015

Watched the first episode of AMC's "Preacher" tonight and spent several minutes pausing the show to explain just what was happening, which went like this (spoiler alert):

"Jesse Custer was a hitman-ish, now a preacher and is supposed to get the half-angel/half-demon spawn named Genesis inside him, so he, his gun-toting girlfriend Tulip O'Hare and his new friend Cassidy, an Irish vampire, can take on the international fundamental organization that is bent on harnessing the power of God to be used by the biological descendant of Jesus Christ, for their nefarious purposes."

You don't really get that from the first episode, so I may be buying some back issues of Ennis and Dillon from circa 1992.

29 July 2016

Cleaning up the woods.

28 July 2016

In lieu of barbells, goblet squat rocks.

27 July 2016

I succeeded in packing a carry-on backpack with a leather black briefcase I bought twelve years ago as my personal item.  I packed no knives, hatchets, chainsaws or liquids, excluding a small container of homemade deodorant. 

Finished reading Little Brother and started on Mr. Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to Be Free (certainly a riff on that Queen song popularized by Coke Zero advertisements).  Next up is Jim Butcher's Summer Knight as I'm entrenched in the Dresdenverse now.

25 July 2016

Everyday carry forums are full of men espousing the virtues of one tactical backpack over another.  Many of these gentlemen (and I use that term loosely...) allegedly use their packs for carrying tools, photography equipment or medical supplies to support their job or very serious hobby.  Today was one of the days in which I got sucked into "must search edcforums.com to determine if the particular black backpack I currently own is good enough" mode.  Day to day, I carry gym shorts, a gym shirt, a pair of VFFs (the pair I actually have is discontinued and was on sale last year for $35), a change of underwear, a notebook, a speedrope, earbuds and too many cheap pens.

Do I need a 5.11 Tactical Hazardous Materials Manly Masculine Musculature (Hmmmm?) bag?  No, but reading blogs about what tools I carry in my bugout, EDC or 72 hour bag makes me feel masculine and organized.  Buying these expensive bags would be purchasing feelings.  So instead I bought a small black flashlight at Wal-Mart for $3.97.

24 July 2016

Sunday I tend to make platters of food.  So today I used up twenty one eggs, three packages of cow muscle, ten peaches, one and a half pounds of pulled pork, about half a container of greek yogurt, and some other ingredients to make a casserole of breakfast-deliciousness, two large containers of peach clafouti and a delicious steak with sauteed mushrooms.  The glove to the left of the steak is what Jaime Lannister would wear if he was a sous chef. 

Was able to fast today for roughly twenty hours as I didn't eat any meal until about five post meridiem.  Thank goodness for my daily forty ounces of coffee.  

23 July 2016

I checked out of one hotel due to air conditioning problems, checked into another hotel and then found out that my stained and bacteria encrusted Mach 3 razor handle from a previous millennium had been left behind.  The hotel was kind enough to let me inspect the room, but the maids already threw out the razor, my blood stained towels and my fishing pole.  Oh well.  I was able to butcher my face with a disposable one-bladed Bic yesterday and tomorrow night I'll use my safety razor for a smooth shave.

On my drive from Florida to Alabama last week, I listened to four of the Longform podcasts: episodes 141 (Stephen J. Dubner aka half of Freakanomics), 153 (Tim Ferriss aka the Four Hour everything), 159 (Ira Glass aka Mr. This American Life) and 164 (Lena Dunham of HBO's Girls fame).  I found the first three fascinating and Lena Dunham boring.  Stephen Dubner talked about writing and working with the other Steven on their books.  Tim Ferriss is a very interesting person, but I keep reverting to "Yeah, we'll he's single, no kids, worked his ass off and then sold his business!  Of course he travels the world and does all kinds of cool stuff!"  Ira Glass talked about the beginning of working for NPR and what he almost called his show instead of TAL.  Lena Dunham just seems too young for me and haughty.  I've only seen the first episode of Girls so I'll have to give it another shot.

I used the Stitcher app on my phone to listen to more recent episodes on my phone and enjoyed the Jack Hitt, Kathryn Schulz and Frank Rich episodes.  Many of the Longform interviewees are writers, so now I need to go read Mr. Hitt's "Fiasco", finally read "The Really Big One" on the New Yorker (about the impending earthquake that will impact Washington, Oregon and California) and go watch Veep on HBO.  Since I have to watch, read or listen to media in numerical order, I started over today with episode 1 and got through episode 4.  If you really want to listen to them I figure by now you can navigate to the moving picture experts group layer three file or use an app.  If you have an iPhone, there is a Longform app for it, but apparently none for Android.

22 July 2016

This is Canada's flag, not to be confused with:

...Colorado's state flag.

This is Captain Marvel (used to be Shazam...)...or it is Shazam again...

...and this is the Flash.  Note the slight difference in the lightning bolts: Billy's is wider and flat on top, whereas Barry's is long, thin and, well, not flat on top.

I used to just wear T-shirts like this one:

21 July 2016

 

"I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.”

― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

Last night I went out to a local Irish Pub for trivia night.  I didn't know if anyone else I knew would be there, but figured I would just sidle up to an established team and join theirs.  Much to my surprise, there was a table of fourteen people who I knew, so I joined their table.

Earlier in the evening, I made a half-hearted attempt to notify my coworkers of the event, but it was while everyone was leaving to go home and no one paid me any mind.  

Here's what I learned:

1. I was the only one at the bar who knew that the Marshall Tucker Band sang "Heard it in a Love Song"
2. The Kings sang "You Really Got Me" in 1964
3. Dollar Tree recently bought Family Dollar
4. Oxygen (atomic number 8) is the first single vowel element in the periodic table
5. Michael Faraday's electromagnetic research led to the principle of induction and cages to contain radio frequency wave propagation

Tonight I gave in and ate almost a whole meat lovers pizza myself.  

20 July 2016

"When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes."
- Erasmus

I love going to local used book stores.  Many of the ones I've seen in the past few years have a special shelf or table of local authors, which most of the time I don't really care about.  Occasionally I'll find a gem, like last week when I found a used paperback copy of The Martian for eight bucks.  I read it in two days.  Thrift stores are great, too, and I started my first Cory Doctorow book, Little Brother, a few days ago, which I picked up for twenty five cents at a local thrift store.  I think the book is (hopefully) farfetched insofar as what the DHS would do to some kids who like to subvert weakly secured operating systems and play video games.  The book does make me think about encryption for personal use and rebuying Bunnie Huang's book, Hacking the Xbox.  The only encryption I use on a daily basis is https, Lastpass and Crashplan.  The other great thing about Mr. Doctorow is his website on which he gives many of his books away for free.  That, combined with Calibre, enabled me to get a .mobi version of his book onto my Kindle.   

Get reading and stop using a spreadsheet for your passwords.

19 July 2016

Much thanks to wget, dd and the F2 key for helping me get a graphical version of Lubuntu back up and running yesterday.  I did a few Google searches, spent $7 on a USB stick and was able to get my netbook from 2010 from a command line only environment to a GUI again, which makes blogging a lot easier.  Stuck with Lubuntu 14.04 32-bit this time since i love old hardware.

Now I am trying to integrate LastPass's password generator with Ubuntu's Launcpad "forgot my password from six years ago" and see if I can figure out the GnuPrivacy Guard functions.

18 July 2016

"Eureka!"
- That guy you know who fixed his computer that one time

Don't know why I didn't think of it till today, but I bought a seven dollar USB drive and am downloading the latest Lubuntu LTS ISO via wget.  All I need to do now is wait for the file to download, use dd to burn it to my flash drive and then fix my install.  The real solution will be probably be "reinstall OS" which I'm okay with.

17 July 2016

Woke up today abruptly to the sun shining in my window telling me not to be lazy and get out of bed.  Finished binge-reading The Martian, this time in print which took me roughly twenty four hours, versus the year it took me to not finish the dot mobi version.  Washed my two loads of laundry while I read and then walked over to the sauna that was the gym today.  Decided to do my complete workout today and took my damn too.  Thankfully I was able to borrow some hand chalk from a deadlifting beast si the bar didn't slip out of my hands while power cleaning.  Now I am sipping fair trade, sustainable coffee in an un-air conditioned cafe while beads of sweat paint the floor.  Housemade focaccia is delicious.

16 July 2016

With a netbook that isn't letting me use a GUI (error starting Light desktop manager), I've been learning about how to use the command line to attempt to recover my system.  Which means I've been searching the internets for such key phrases as "recover Ubuntu system without that USB live key I so desperately need" and "restore system state to a few nights ago when things worked and before I installed a bunch of applications i don't need" and "enable wifi command line nmcli wlan0 oh god why won't this thing work."

Some of the commands I've had the misfortune to use include:
- dpkg
- nmcli
- apt-get autoremove
- apt-get purge
- grep
- cat

Needless to say, best I can do is get to a command line after wandering through the recovery console.  So, I thought why not try to email or blog directly from the command line?  Turns out both are more complicated than for which I have patience.  which lead me to installing a full version of vim and then staring at the screen thinking, "This is no DOS edit.exe.". So I installed nano, edited the nanorc configuration file to wrap and chowned the nano history folder from root back to myself.

Now I just need to think of something worth typing.

15 July 2016

"Calm is the best revenge."
- Bangambiki Habyarimana

A fried asked me for sage advice today and here's what i told him. 
- Take free education as soon as you can.
- Invest as much as you can in a 401k
- Start a Roth IRA for you and your wife
- Learn as much about your job as you can
- Research starting strength by Rippetoe
- Don't eat bread
- Improve systems, processes and people
- Never get less than 12 hours of sleep a night
- Never play cards with a man who has the first name of a city
- Never get involved as woman who has a tattoo of a dagger

14 July 2016

"You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients."
- Julia Child

Get a skillet or frying pan and set it on the stove top to medium heat.  Add two tablespoons of oil (coconut, lard , bacon grease or tallow is best).  Dice an onion while the oil heats.  Put half of the onion in the pan and save the other half for the next meal.  Slice some mushrooms (I like crimini, but normally the moat interesting i can find are baby bellas) and put them in the pan after the onions have softened. 

While that is simmering, put some tomato sauce in a pot on medium low heat.  Ideally, you would start with fresh tomatoes, garlic, oregano and basil, but a jar often must suffice.  A midway solution would be a can of diced tomatoes with a tablespoon of tomato paste, mixed with some butter.  Either way...add some brown mustard to the onion pan and stir that.  Add oil as necessary so the bits don't burn.  Add some heavy cream to the tomato sauce and stir. 

Take a pack of chicken sausages (I use Aidells) and slice into rings.  Add these to the onion pan and throw a list on it, to heat for four or five minutes.  Mix the tomato sauce into the skillet and serve.

Julia Child wasn't always a chef.

13 July 2016

"My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time."
- Jerry Seinfeld

If you haven't seen Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, you should start.  It's on line and can be streamed via the Crackle app on Roku devices. 

His quote makes me think of Tony Soprano not caring about the end of Seven, because what does it matter to his life in Waste Management?

Killed time this evening by squatting 205lbs, pressing 155, cleaning 145 and doing some weighted chinups.  Found a more focused work out location, more barbell-zen, so I will be going back.

Embrace your boredom when you can afford it.

12 July 2016

I'm in a hotel room and Pretty Woman is on.  The plot doesn't make sense.  Take a gander here.

Red is on which makes me want to read that comic.

11 July 2016

What if you could go back in time to help your parents babysit yourself?  Wouldn't that be great?  You could say to your current timeline mom, "Hey, please watch your grandkids for me while I go on a cruise around the world.  Don't worry; I'm going to go back in time and help you and dad watch me.  I'll bring cash."

10 July 2016

Breakfast was a sirloin steak, mushrooms and onions in butter/bacon grease, breakfast casserole and French pressed coffee.  Skipped lunch, but snacked on cheese crackers and chips.  Dinner is smoked trout, fresco salad and burger wrapped in lettuce.

9 July 2016

Today has been a force myself to leave the house and not be a hermit day.  I met up with the local Mensa group for the first time and enjoyed a shrimp remoulade salad with unsweetened (read: bitter) tea.  Also did my mandatory Harbor Freight visit, but only picked up some two part epoxy, sandpaper and a free 25' measuring tape.  In case you are wondering, Home Depot does not sell the HDX shelves in pieces, so I'll either buy a whole new 48" wide set or find some compatible shelf pieces on Amazon.

No gym visit today as I'll restart on my Starting Strength 3x5 routine on Monday.  I am please to have substituted power cleans for Pendlay Rows and am only doing one set of deadlifts rather than three.

My program is in bold above.  If you want to learn more about this craziness, check out Mark Rippetoe.

Here's Niki's blag.

8 July 2016

I love books.  One of my oldest friends gave me a Kindle paperwhite for a birthday gift a few years ago, which I rarely use because reading books feels more real to me.  I enjoy the tactile sensation of flipping through the pages and moving my eyes across the printed words.  The same connection with the story does not come across with ebooks or audio books.  The only ebook that comes close is Warren Ellis' Cunning Plans.  I started reading a sample on my Kindle last year about this time and figured $1.99 for a book was a steal.  The book is a collection of his talks about technology, the past and the future of how humans interact with technology and the world.  Rewinding a bit, I enjoy reading the "I'm X and This is How I Work" on lifehacker.  Well I read Warren Ellis' interview a year ago and have been reading his blog and have subscribed to his Sunday newsletter since.  If the bald head, beard and skulls don't do it for you, nothing will.  Another interesting HIW article is Cory Doctorow, which lead me to buy widgy bars.

Anyway, books and lists of books.  I've added a widget that shows the books I'm reading (assuming I've updated my Goodreads account recently...) and played with the layout to make it darker, like coffee and my Ikea desk at home.  If you want to add widget to your blog, specifically Goodreads stuff, check out this useful fella.  

7 July 2016

In case you haven't heard, NASA hit a milestone yesterday.  And if you are interested, here's milestone.  Also funny: those Romans.


For more Juno...xkcd...

or...

or...

or...

Jupiter and Juno (on the left)

or... Did you know?

And finally, here's some smooth R&B to get your night started, "Didja Know" by Groove Theory.

  

6 July 2016

Found out today that I might get to take the walk test instead of the run test this month.  I am still progressing running on the treadmill so I can pass my 1.5 mile run test.  The fun about the walk test is that it is 1.25 miles (I'm American; the test is 2 kilometers) in less than 16 minutes and 18 seconds, meaning 4.67 miles an hour.  So I'm debating going to the gym on a rest day to see if I can pass that now.

I reread this article about wasting time and clouding your own perception about working out, and found this calculator that talks about methodically progressing on a strength program.

If you really want to spend half a day thinking about barbells, read this post.

5 July 2016

When using tax software to complete a 1040-X, make sure you know what you are doing.

This year I submitted my taxes electronically with H&R Block and then made an amendment about a month later.  Apparently, if one does not click the right link, one could edit the original taxes and somehow merge that 1040 into a 1040-X.  The IRS did not figure this out, but they did calmly ignore my amendment and never tell me anything.  H&R Block customer service chatted with me this afternoon for almost an hour and gave me a free code to use their software again to right the situation.  Thank you Eliza.

4 July 2016

This.  Happy Fourth of July.

3 July 2016

The success of today was going almost twenty hours without a meal.  I had my usual strong coffee alongside two cans of seltzer for breakfast, accompanied by a few spoonfuls of coconut oil.  After reading in the morning, I put away the kids toys, vacuumed the floors and moved some boxes around in the garage.  I finally made myself go to the gym to squat, press, row and run on the treadmill, after only eating a piece of cheese and some olives.

This summer I have three knife projects going: an old Sysco chef knife, a cheap paring knife I bought from Kroger's in Tennessee and an engraved Bowie-style knife that my new neighbor gave me.  After removing the cheap handles from each, I was appalled at the manufacturer's manner in which they built these knives.  The chef's knife isn't a full tang or hidden tang, it is half a tang, so I plan on drilling a tight hole and putting a pin through the end of the tang.  The paring knife has a full tang, but is essentially hollow, with three holes for pins.  So this one should be basically a regular knife handle project.  The Bowie has zero tang: the handle was connected to a thin length of flattened rod that simple sits in a notch in the bottom of the blade.  I was able to flattened a length of brass rod with a ball peen hammer and a grinder to fit in the notch, so I plan on using alternating small rectangles for the handle, possibly with pieces of leather from an old wallet in between, kinda like this or this.

Time to go take another vinegar bath and eat oxtail soup!

2 July 2016

I learned today that going boating means changing out rusted lug nuts and replacing the flat tire on a trailer first.  Thankfully, we had Raid, which must be a first cousin once removed to WD-40 and helped loosen the rusted bolts.  After we got going, we went fishing, which could also be described as throwing shrimp lures into the water while conversing about errata.

That shiny should means I am now pink all over and ready for bed.  Since it was lunch time, we did stop at a local restaurant and dined on salmon, broccoli, mashed potatoes and soup and salad.  The best thing about keto is drowning your plate in butter and cheese.

 

Now I am tired and ready for a bath of vinegar, lavender oil and epsom salts and more wholesome television.

For dessert I attempted a chocolate coconut mousse, but my version is definitely not keto.  I am using up random ingredients I have on hand, which means I used liquid coconut milk, powdered coconut milk, heavy cream, Dannon whole milk yogurt, real sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, baking chocolate, shredded coconut, cocoa powder, frozen cherries and half a packet of French Vanilla jello.  Blended everything but the jello and put it in a round casserole dish and put it in the freezer.  I threw the jello powder in after thinking the thing wouldn't set.  It's been in the freezer for just under an hour now, so we'll see how it tastes.  

1 July 2016

Happy 149th Birthday Canada!

We celebrated Canada Day with some cheap hot dogs and cheeseburgers, which I made into lettuce wraps.  It was decent and I even indulged in a Canada beer, the first beer I have consumed in almost two years.  After I left, I went to pick up my repaired Stihl MS 180, just in case I wanted to turn some fallen trees into firewood this weekend.  On the way, I visited a local gun shop to add to my ammunition stores and see about a holster for a revolver.  After I found a block of 500 rounds, the clerk asked me if I was paying cash or charge.  He beckoned me close and whispered conspiratorially, "Cash is cheaper."  I thought he was going to tell me who shot Kennedy, not the fact that give a discount to folks who ignore the benefit of the float.

On the drive home, I was feeling sleepy from the beer and now I'm fantasizing about brewing specialty cups of coffee.  So, I turn to my trusty pal for anything otaku and found this.  I currently have a 12 cup (which always bothers me, because these machines call 5 ounces a cup, when my cup size is 12 or 18 ounces) Mr. Coffee with a thermal carafe.  I use whole beans and an electric burr grinder.  I used to have a French Press but after a few years use it broke in the dishwasher.  I've heard great things about the Aeropress and even thought about a stovetop version, but according to this site, drip machines aren't even a viable option if I want to be considered a coffee snob.  When the power went out in February, I did put my grounds in steeping bags and pour boiling water over the bags into the carafe, but that method is not recommended nor mentioned on the site linked previously.  Well, now I'm sucked into the noob site so now I have ideas for the morning.