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Gregg and Marcus came over to build decks for Friday Night Magic when I was talking with some people over Mumble, the voice chat utility Team Interrobang uses when they heard one of the female team members talking.

Gregg: Is that a girl?
Me: Yes.  Team Interrobang is slightly above a total sausagefest, possibly at the simply awkward level of female participation.
Gregg: Wow, does she shoot people?
Female Member over Mumble: Guess what, Terry?
Me: What?
Female Member over Mumble: I’m going to the gun range tomorrow.
Gregg: You have the greatest team in the history of the planet.

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DISCLAIMER: This is me yelling at a product.  It probably won’t be funny. Although the paragraph on Blu-Ray gets chuckles.

I cancelled my Netflix description today.   I loved Netflix, I really did.  I rewatched most of Star Trek: The Next Generation for about 1/3 the price of buying the DVDs, discovered a wonderful gift for my mother, and got to see some movies I couldn’t have imagined running into otherwise but the final straw was Blu-Ray.  I recognize the oddity that upgrading my service that could easily have been reversed but the trip was long.

I purchased a blu-ray drive many moons ago and had lost the CD that came with it containing the software.  I contacted the drive company for a replacement which I got a curt “check the software maker’s web page to see if they have it”.  They do, for a mere $79.99 plus a $4.99 digital download fee.  There are no free blu-ray decrypters in that the technologies involved make the NSA look quaint, but found three or four suites that’d let me try them for 30 days, when strung together I was hoping I have bought enough time to see a free option emerge.  I got everything set up and was immediately struck with how unimpressive the entire experience was.  1920 x 1200 is nice for TV but the primary things my 30″ monitor does is play display hi-res images or video games, both of which could gobble up resolutions up to WQUXGA without breaking a sweat and look gorgeous at 2560 x 1600.  1920 x 1080, really?  Two megapixels?  Despite the underwhelming appearance I watched a disc or two as it was still better than DVD, presentation-wise.

Then I migrated to Windows 7 and popped in Bender’s Game only to receive a HDCP violation notice after the copyright notice.

Aside: Sometimes things rub me the wrong way in a way that’s so profoundly disturbing just to me that the paroxysmal rages they induce have resulted in me breaking things with sufficient force that generations from now my Hulk-smashes will match the legends of the formation of the Giant’s Causeway or formation of Japan.  I don’t like when people violate my three rules of polite conversation nor when people tell me to change a time for something when they’re not my employer.

Great, you don’t like Windows 7, Paramount.  BUT AFTER THE F*#&ING LEGAL WARNING.  ARE YOU MOCKING ME!  “Hey, before we eff up your viewing experience we want to take a moment to remind you that there’s no possible way besides this bundle of proprietary cloak-and-dagger technologies to watch this content in higher-def.  Thanks for your money, sucker consideration, viewer.”  I had the disc between the thumb and pointer fingers of each of my hands and slowly allowed my arms to pronate when I remembered something: Netflix doesn’t have a “oops, I broke it clause” like Blockbuster does.  Maybe that’s why Blockbuster went under, not inferior choice, service and shipping, but people destroying blu-ray disc after disc in frustration.  I placed the disc in its Tyvek sleeping bag and slid that into the travel tent of the mailing sleeve.  I placed it in my mailbox this morning at about 1/4 after 4 AM and drove to work to cancel my Netflix account.  They were guilty by association.

You know what else pisses me off about blu-ray besides insulting the user at every turn with it’s technical ability to bar you from viewing your own content at almost any time?  IT’S NAME.  Blu-ray could fit easily into the set of ridiculous cinema technologies from the 50s like mega-vision, view-o-rama, or Glorious EXTRA color.  HD DVD made so much more sense not only technologically but had a superior non-descript moniker that perfectly described what it did.  It was a better DVD.  Blu-ray?  What the fuck does that mean? Yes, I know there’s a blue laser involved which is part of the reason that there’s an extra benjamin to the player’s purchasing cost but you couldn’t call it like XDVD, DVD2 or something that made sense?  This is why Sony’s technologies such, miniDisc, Betamax, and MemoriStik (I assume it had a non-standard spelling despite it probably just being Memory Stick) were beaten out by CD, VHS, and CF or SD respectively.  Standards by law should have dull names that involve no lacerations to the English language.  Die in a ditch, Blu-Ray.

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Baking Challenge Lady returned today:

Her: Is this a carrot cake?
Me: No.  It’s a fudge cake.
Her: Oh, so it’s a carrot cake.
Me: No.  It’s a fudge cake.
Her: A fudge cake.  Interesting.
Me: By the way, I never caught your name.
Her: <her name>, what’s yours? (Despite that she sought me by name on our first meeting)
Me: Terry.
Her: Oh, I’ve wanted to meet you.
Me: You did, last week, when you asked for me by name.
Her: It is you! (What?)
Me: Anyway, your palms feel rough, would you like some skin cream? *Present bottle of our firm’s skin cream*
Her: Thank you.  *Takes dollop and rubs it onto the back of her hand* So you made this from scratch?
Me: I do with most of my stuff, except for pie doughs, I suck at pie doughs.  And you?
Her: Usually, but I take shortcuts like using cake mix and buying the frosting in those little cans.

Ah… Mind you, if I were really a purist I would steep the vanilla beans myself and squeeze the egg out of the chicken but I’m confident in saying buying cake mix and frosting is not considered baking from scratch.  I am now not only fighting for myself, my department, or my sex, but for every person who’s ever f*ed up recipe but gotten away with it because it was made with grandma’s recipe which included things like rounded 1/4 tablespoons, sweet milk (from a time when buttermilk was common) and considered instant yeast the devil’s powder.  I will win, and it will be glorious.

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Butter Cream is the result of great serendipity or genius like the Bessemer process, ePTFE (Teflon) or the chocolate chip cookie.  Somehow, someone said to themselves “Scrambled eggs: within you I see the potential for a cake topping”.  Then, with grim determination, this scion of flavor learned to think like an egg protein and deigned to find a way to prevent protein cross-linkage.  The breakthrough was slow heat and rotary forearm ferocity normally reserved for pubescent teenagers.   I’ve attempted to make butter cream twice before, in the first case I created sweet scrambled eggs, in the second I created a stunt double for the The Blob that resulted in me losing a saucier.  This time, I took a moment to center myself, made a double boiler of metal bowl and 2 qt chef’s pan and set to overcome the legion failures I’d made in the Organic Chemistry lab.  The temperature approached 160°F which is normally the magical temperature that cross-linking begins but a little known fact is that egg foams can smell fear.   Alternatively, the pheromones emitted during my roar of determination at 159°F disrupted the electron cloud of the involved sulfur and my butter cream was victorious.

I had to cut the butter cream with some confectioner’s sugar to edge out the saltiness of the sweet cream I was forced to use being otherwise out of unsalted butter but otherwise it served as a capable topping to the “fudge cake” that was neither fudgy nor cake-like but this failing was devoured by sheer metaphysical delight of having a cake topped largely with butter.

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I found some heavy poster stock while cleaning out a closet and decided to try my hand at mounting a few prints.  I quickly discovered that the spray adhesive I was using is vastly less forgiving than I thought.  My table was momentarily a wood-shod piece of flypaper until I found an appropriate solvent (50% toluene/50% isopropyl alcohol go!) but the true disaster were the prints.  Bubbles, bulges, creases and some alignings that Michael J Fox could have set more assiduously.   I did some trimming triage and they didn’t turn out half bad, maybe I should aim to be the Jackson Pollack of mounting and framing.

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Sam: Where’s Terry running?
Teejay: I think he heard something.
*Sam and Teejay emerge out of woods onto road I was panting*
Me: Damn.  I thought I heard an ice cream truck.

Me to Teejay while walking up a hill: Is this what exercise feels like?
Teejay: I hope not, it feels suspiciously similar to effort.

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Teejay had a wonderful idea.  Let’s take our cameras, and take pictures of nice things.   So, he, Sam Lodise and I went to Churchville Nature Center and attacked it with photographic vigor.  Teejay, having more latent skill and inclination than either Sam or myself took a number of quality shots.  Interestingly, the best photo he took of the day was in my driveway waiting for Sam and I to figure out if we wanted to bring our tripods.  Here it is:

Teejay's various-877-20090523

I printed it out as an 8.5″ x 11″ and it looks swell.  I desaturated the background a little to make Max stand out and punched up the red a bit to compensate for  a loss of brilliance on printing.

Teejay also took my favorite shot of the day, catching me in my “aggro-photo” pose that’ll I use as my stock icon for things from now on:

Teejay's various-984-20090523

I think it conveys my theory of photography whereas the photographer should have a warcry, mine being “ROTATE, CROP TO WIDESCREEN, PUNCH UP SATURATION.”  I was mocked for this tendancy in post processing but the new site banner is a result of this.  The picture I’ll giggle at for sometime is this gem:

May 23, 2009-79-Churchville Nature Center

If you blow it up to full screen, Teejay looks a spot like a Faulknerian Idiot Manchild or saying “my feet hurt” and Sam’s preoccupation with his uber-mega-macro-telephoto-portrait-widescreen-pano-lens.  He used it in manual for most of the day resulting in a very nice close up shot of blur.  If Sasquatch ever had a photoshoot, that’s what I’d use.

The day also triggered two Moments of Fatness.

The whole album:

[flickr album=72157618703444396 num=30 size=Thumbnail]

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Our network drive that contains the drawings and notes about drawings for the CAD group contains 1.2 million files of which about 10K are useful.  Apparently, the world will come to an end if we don’t save the other ones which are non-human-readable, non-dependent, non-mandated files generated by a module in our software we no longer use.  My boss asked me to oversee the backup as he was on vacation on Friday and ran into trouble doing it the previous few days and I jumped at the opportunity.

All went well with the first 1.1 million of the 1.2 million transferred perfectly using TeraCopy but I kept running into a deluge of transfer errors which caused the program to lockup.  After trying a few things and probably breaking storage best practices in a dozen ways including forcable unlocking every file on drive, checking for faulty sectors, and applying some network juju to find hidden files I checked the free space.  Space available on drive: 120 megs.  Space required for backup: 292 gigs.  I’ve seen 7zip do some impressive shit, but it may have met its match and I was reminded of a rule I learned at RadioShack.  The complexity of the problem is inverse proportional to the complexity of the tools used to find it.

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On reflection, our ninja tenants don’t quite live with us so much as they’ve infiltrated our home. One appears to have simple preferences as witnessed by the food that’s magically appeared consisting of:

  • 8 jars of self-canned peach preserves
  • 4 bags of Easter candy
  • 24 bottles of some protein drink
  • 4 3-packs of egg substitute
  • 6 8-oz bottles of Canada Dry Seltzer Water
  • A small plastic canister of cloves

Maybe if combined properly they form the ninja equivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone.  If I ever actually see one of our tenants, I will ask.  Assuming I’m not hit with a poison dart or the Vulcan nerve pinch first.

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My company requires IE6 on its computers and bars upgrading. One can install another browser as long as you import the network settings and I’ve used both Firefox and Chrome without incident since September. Today, I had a conversation with my boss about it.

Boss: So, the people that do the web app we use for doc management has recommended I try “The Firefox”. What is it?
Me: It’s a web browser, like Internet Explorer but without the suck.
Boss: I thought IE was the only browser after the loss of Netscape Navigator. Is it expensive?
Me: It’s free, and has a plugin architecture that’s quite keen.
Boss: I don’t know. I’ve always been skeptical of anyone who’d give their software away.

Anyway, he gave it a try and is now going through some sort of browser experimentation phase. I think I saw him run Firefox, IE, Safari and Konquerer simultaneously. I was worried at first that he’d gone overboard but he’s a sharp fellow. Although I may have to intervene if I see him using Flock, Opera or Ice Weasel.