I plot desserts along three axes: ease of preparation, joy of consumption, and appearance. I focus heavily on the ratio of joy of consumption to ease of preparation as that maximizes the brownie points I receive from my coworkers. For instance, truffles are fantastically easy to prepare and quite tasty but ugly. A ganache coating increases appearance but at the cost of difficulty. Anything with a homemade crust is low on prep ease and medium in consumption so I generally don’t bother.
Cheesecake with a topping or filling sits at the apex of the three, being difficult to prepare well, pretty, and makes one feel like one’s tongue were being hugged. The difficulty comes from handling as cheesecakes will crumble and crack if you look at them funny. Additionally, they involve making a separate crust and blank-baking it and require a setting period that alternates between hot and cold and can take in excess of six hours. So, what if I simply sacrificed appearance and slashed out much of the coddling? I was going to find out.
One tactic to ensure even heating is to bake the cake in a hot water bath. F that. Another is to leave the oven door open a crack while leaving the oven at a low temperature for six hours. F that as well. I went for the much simpler “remove it from the oven and put it in the fridge” tactic and was rightly punished. What emerged looked like the lid of a mason jar. The cake had rose jack-straight about 3/4″ above the rim of the pan and then caved in like someone had put a belt around it only to return to its original width before flattening to a plateau evoking the cracked surface of a dessicated flood plain. Hm…
Only in one other case had I refused to serve something because it looked hideous and that was because I literally dropped it. I think my solution was somewhat clever: I popped the cheesecake in the freezer, firmed it up a bit, sawed the top off and glazed the remaining cake with cocoa powder and melted semisweet chocolate. The best part was having an excuse to have a breakfast consisting of the top of a cheesecake.
While our tenants are theoretically renters we’ve very much taken a “you break it you bought it” attitude to home repairs. One accidentally flushed a toilet bowl freshener which stopped up the toilet in ways that polyurethane foam couldn’t. He attacked it for several hours with a combination of a plunger, a toilet snake, a trash bag, and a beer can (?) and I thought he was victorious. Based on much loud cursing, a little sobbing, and a sticky note that said “DO NOT USE” affixed to the toilet I guess he wasn’t.
A day later, inspiration apparently struck as I was sitting at my computer and heard him yell “aha!” at 2 AM. There was a flurry of activity that ended with what sounded like a shower and him returning to bed. His triumph was confirmed by a new stick it note: “USE!!!” The previous note had been moved to a roll of paper towels that were… browned.
Nick D brought me the new judge shirt back from PT: San Diego and I was excited to try it on. The previous judge shirt was creatively termed “the zebra stripes” and had the dubious distinction of turning into a midriff-bearing shirt if the wearer was over 6′1″ or had a dunlopus majoris protruding more than three inches. I was going to start the next paragraph with the phrase “I put on the new shirt” but putting on implies several things such as the gowning process being free of grunts, cries and panhoots and of being easily reversible. I more accurately applied the new judge shirt and later peeled it off. The arms were splendidly sized but my first attempt to pick up garbage would have turned the button line into a sartorial fragmentation grenade (Magic players: I was tempted to make a Triskelion joke). I nearly lost my shirt when another player said “Bruce Banner, I just hit your car.” This was the largest shirt available.
My mass is exceptional and I fully recognize that I should incur extra cost due to it . I pay more for food, clothing, transportation, health insurance, and the niceties that streamline corpulent living but among all possible communities that would require clothing of exceptional size the Venn Diagram of sedentary, pedantic, and gourmand which coalesces with “WoTC judge” should be the acme of need. I’ve heard a large judge took to his shirt with scissors and made patches of the embroidery to put on a larger shirt (which mentally led me to another card allusion). I enjoy judging and don’t wish to abandon it, but should it become necessary I may need to start scouring for an embroiderer, shirt laster, or personal training. God forbid the latter.
As an hourly employee, I’m not a terrible fan of snow days. Like most closings, it simply a way of saying “try and get 40 hours in now, bitch” while the full-time staff blows a holiday to make-up the difference. Late openings are a different beast entirely as the calculus of presence changes. If one shows up and one’s supervisor doesn’t, the work time is entirely unverifiable. Alternatively, some may expect their wards to arrive on time in spite of the delay and yet others use it as an excuse to try to force time out of people later. So, what was the outcome of the snow day roulette? By some stroke of amazing luck all three of four of the full time office members were sick today. What are the odds of this happening? I wanted to find out:
The average American gets 1.7 colds a year lasting on average 3 days generate 2.8 sickdays a year. Let’s assume most colds come in a 4-month window and that colds that are start at the same time are independent of one another. What’s that come out to? About 0.00041%. Sure glad I trudged through the snow to get in my time and to see that statistical miracle.
At about 11:30 PM the day before my birthday I removed the date from being listed on Facebook to mitigate the deluge of “Huppy Birfday” messages. I checked through other birthday publishing things and turned those off as well but missed one: my TF2 team’s site. Shortly after midnight, someone on the west coast posted “Happy Birthday” and the cascade of the news feed rolled across my friends list. Damn. There is a down-side of not giving a date in that people make assumptions when not given information such as the message from a Scout friend “congratulations on making it to 32!”.
My brother has missed a couple of my birthdays in the past and I don’t hold it against him but he’s developed as a gifter. I received a text message in the morning asking me if I wanted anything in particular, I said no, so I got cash, a card and a pack of gum. He felt uncomfortable not giving me an actual box.
26 feels much like 20 and 22 as useless ages with no milestones. 23-29 is one of the rare inversions in the aggregate life table were one’s less likely to die year-on-year and I can feel the wisdom of age reducing my chances of dying this year being 35 millionths lower than last year. To prove it, I’m going to forego my summer ritual of wrestling a bear while bungee jumping.
Preparing for tournaments is a process of continual refinement. I found that I’ll stay more hydrated by consuming two 1.5 liter bottles of water than a single gallon bottle as I won’t tote the gallon bottle around. I found that if I count to three before delivering a ruling, I’ll probably give a better ruling. Finally, I found that the easiest way to keep an area clean is to remove trash as it accumulates. Once a trash depot appears on a table it will become a magnet for other garbage.
My goal for improvement this tournament was to not flash players while picking up garbage. The judge shirt is a bit shorter than I prefer and bending over either involves me contorting like I’m wearing a miniskirt or doing an impromptu plumber impression. So, I decided to simply wear suspenders which bring the pants up higher causing more coverage and conveniently concealing my dunlop. So, I asked who I thought was the head judge intending it to be a joke and to show my cleverness:
Me: Can I wear suspenders Saturday?
Him: I don’t know, they’re not part of the official uniform.
Me: So? They keep my pants up, that seems like a good thing.
Him: Let me think about it. I don’t know, I’m going to leave it up to the head judge.
2nd conversation with other guy who was the head judge
Me: Can I wear suspenders Saturday?
Him: It’s not part of the uniform, why are you wearing them?
Me: …to keep my pants up.
Him: I don’t know, let me consult some other judges.
Me: YOU HAVE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME.
Him: Hold on.
Him: Ok, I asked some higher-level judges and we’ve come to a few conclusions. Maybe. First, are they tasteful?
Me: They’re black.
Him: Ok, you may wear them, but there’s disagreement, so we’re not going to allow them at PTQ-level events or higher.
It appears alternate modalities of keeping ones pants now requires a pardon from the president or the pope.
My supervisor wasn’t in yesterday.
Coworker: Think he’ll be in today?
Me: I don’t think he’d miss two days in a row without telling all of us.
Coworker: Want do you want to bet on it?
Me: Pizza if he doesn’t come in.
Coworker: Ok *plays message of boss not coming in*
I’ve been snookered. I learned a lesson today: Never trust dwarf Vietnamese CAD designers.
The SSD I got simply wasn’t cutting the mustard on my desktop so I decided to move the drive to my laptop. I thought I was going to have do some hardware-fu but was relieved when I found that my laptop had an empty hard drive bay in it, the laptop’s that big. My attempt at a straight move didn’t quite work out as every f#ing piece of partition management software on the face of the planet won’t allow you to migrate to smaller disk. So what did I do?
1) Create new partition of the same size as OS partition (which in my case was done using the SATA cables to connect to a disk 3 feet away that was a 3.5″ drive).
2) Migrate to new partition
3) Defrag new partition
4) Shrink partition
5)Backup partition
6)Track down 32-bit network drivers for everything
7)Restore to original target partition
Just as easy as it says on the Windows Home Server box. On the plus side, the Microsoft Community moderator gave my solution a gold star! 24 more and I get the “Expert” tag and a green border on the MS forums.
My watch alarm went off today at 11:45 and I felt lost. I had reset the alarm so I could sound the squall drill at the Klondike but for the last three years my watch has gone off at 7:25 PM and 7:30 PM. I can’t remember why I set them in the first place but they’ve been part of my circadian rhythms and a stuttering double beep mean “night”. Five minutes later, I’d receive another set of beeps to remind me of “night”. Now, I’m completely thrown off. I’m like an owl stunned by a lighthouse. I need to reset my watch before the beeping becomes a Pavlovian response for lunch.
First: A pretty and oversaturated view south of the bridge at Tyler State Park
I think chromatic aberration is nicely magnified by Lightroom’s vibrancy function.
The Boy Scout event had nine sleds with 49 Scouts using 15 stations. The two most innovative were Ravine Crossing and Hatchet Throwing.
Ravine Crossing involved Scouts moving their sled across a fake gully using ropes and such but the station operator was not impressed. “The name of the station is Ravine Crossing. There will be a ravine, and kids will cross it.” I laughed but later saw the swath of destruction he had wrought.
The actual event is at least 100 feet from the actual trail and more than one tree was… adjusted.
The sled race was simply spectacular. Normally, the winning team lifts their sled and simply guns the entire course which is a soccer field. 10 inches of wet snow with the adhesive power of gorilla glue turned the course into a forced march through quicksand. Instead of celebrating after victory the winning team literally collapsed and made snow people-grabbing-their-calves-gripping-the-Charlie-Horse.
Rest of Photos
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