Unlike the Mac problem I had this weekend, where what should have been a simple update to the latest OS X Lion version, suddenly made the hard drive unbootable, unverifiable, unrepairable, locked from the Lion installer, invisible to firewire target mode, and, once I bought a new hard drive and got Lion installed on it (which required hours upon hours of downloading the OS, since they don’t sell it on a disc, anymore), unwritable, as a secondary drive, until I reformatted it.

Both these trials took a lot of time, and both seemed to end in some measure of success that felt like accomplishment and improvement… but the old hardware was simpler to deal with… more predictable, more logical, more fun?

Bonus: I submitted a couple pictures of our cat, Peanut, to be included in the catblock gallery, and now I see him in place of ads every now and then.

Step 1: Unwrap the muffin.

Most muffins come in paper and it is never the tastiest part, so we remove it. If you’re lacking in plates/napkins, the wrapper may help contain things during the eating process.

Step 2: Turn muffin upside-down.

Yes, this is what you do. Do it confidently. If some cretin laughs at you for having an upside-down muffin, laugh back at them, because they definitely have some inferior taste lingering in their mouth, since they clearly don’t know how to consume muffins properly.

Step 3: Bite and/or Pull apart.

Things get a little strange, here, depending on where you got your muffin, how big it is, and how crumbly it is. If your muffin is small enough and will hold together, go ahead and start taking bites, from the bottom (which is now on top). If you prefer to tear off a chunk of the muffin, that’s fine. If you’re muffin is particularly crumbly, for example, a corn muffin, or a Coffee Cake muffin from Dunkin’ Donuts, you may want to leave the upside down muffin in the bag it came in, and tear off chunks.

Step 4: Top Consumption.

When all you have left is the best part, you may choose to switch to biting, if you’ve been tearing off chunks to get through the bottom. I leave the muffin upside-down, even if I start biting, because, once I commit to something, I’m in 100%. Depending on the muffin, the middle may even be better than the edges, so plan your bites/chunks accordingly.

I realize that some establishments sell muffin tops. While I do see the point, and might even feel some validation that, since muffin tops exist, I’m not the only person who feels this way about muffins, I think it’s the lazy way out and I will only buy such a muffin top if the discount in price correlates to the amount of muffin deducted. And, since I am now accustomed to the tops of my muffins as pure tops, with no bottom crust, I would have to eat it the same way as I would a normal muffin, first removing the bottom crust.

Warning: Cupcakes are an entirely different animal… as most of them are frosted and must be treated in much the same way as cake. This process is complicated and involves small samples of the frosting, the cake, and the combination, to determine if one is a better candidate for final bite status. If the cake is good, but the combination is clearly better, you can approach it like a muffin. Check for frosting stickiness, though, to avoid a mess, when turning it completely upside-down.  Oftentimes, a cake is best when you have a little bit of frosting with each bite (In a traditional cake shape, any edge or corner slice which has frosting on more than one side necessitates careful pre-planning of each of your bites to achieve this. It can become a complex three-dimensional geometry puzzle). If the cupcake falls into this category, it may be possible to just bite through it, keeping it upright, however, cupcakes are notorious for being over-frosted, so you mustn’t be afraid to remove some frosting.

Not really in the mood to post any big long blog, tonight. A man I respected and admired, who wrote songs that actually made me dance once, is dead. I’m sad that any pictures of him that I once had were lost in the great hard drive failure of ’03 and I’m far away from Worcester, and cannot mourn with my fellow Wormtowners, but I am thankful that the state of the internet let me be part of the conversation and that this exists: http://75.130.235.51:8005/listen.m3u

I spent most of the day working on an upgrade to  Mom’s quilt shop’s website. This is a project I started when I was out there in February, and just haven’t had the time to finish, until today. Unfortunately, I couldn’t finish it, completely. The whole reason I started the upgrade process was that her site suddenly used all its bandwidth, one day. The culprit seemed to be her cart software’s inability to create its own product thumbnails. It was just using html to resize the huge pictures, slowing all the loading times and eating up all her bandwidth. There was a system that would display thumbnails on the appropriate pages, if you created them and named them with a proper suffix and/or put them in the proper folder… but it wasn’t working. When I finally got things all upgraded and working again, I downloaded a bunch of her product photos, got them all thumbnail-sized … and then FTP stopped responding. Timeout, timeout, timeout. So, it’s not really done and the guy who might be able to look into why it’s not responding, and restart a service or something, is in England, and probably asleep.

Then I grabbed the Lumix GF2 that I got for Sarah, last year, and took a walk around the neighborhood. I haven’t really used it, but I found it pretty easy to get the hang of. It’s weird having to use the screen and not having a viewfinder, and I miss the flexibility of macro mode from my camera, which I couldn’t find in the menus upon menus… but it took some pretty nice shots, and the fact that I can change out that lens and even put something crazy like the Pinwide lens on there is darn cool. And it’s nice and light; I walked around the block with it on my neck and didn’t once feel it weighing me down.

circle

suburban pond

no skating

roots

twolips

flowering tree which will make a big mess soon

not latte art

cutes

Speaking of breaks, I have tomorrow off! Maybe I’ll play some video games, it’s been a while… a month or more, I think. It’s also Micro Four Thirds Day, and we happen to own a mu-43 camera, so maybe I’ll take some pictures!

Speaking of pictures, I saw this giant plume of dark smoke when I got close to home… in the exact direction of home… and I found myself hoping that home wasn’t on fire. I think, maybe, the landfill across the street from our subdivision is on fire. So maybe we’re safe. There’s certainly a lot of ash floating through the air.

Speaking of air…. um, I got nothing.

It makes me sad that we have to water down the risk in activities that are designed to be risky.

The first problem with my Doritos Locos Taco experience was the drive-thru cashier. He gave me a moist towelette. It seems like a nice gesture, sure, but he handed it to me before he even gave my card back, and said, “You’re gonna need this, for yo’ fingers, trust me.”  This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, I suppose, Doritos leave stuff all over your fingers, so why shouldn’t a Dorito-taco-thing? Unfortunately, this immediately put me on the defensive, because when a normal person needs a moist towelette, I might need several. Then there was the wrapping. It had a paper wrapper, like any other taco from Taco Bell, but then, there was a paper sleeve. Was it just there for Doritos branding? Maybe, but then why was one end closed and the other open? Was I supposed to gradually push the taco out the open end of the sleeve and take bites of the exposed end? Perhaps… and that’s what I tried to do, which resulted in a disastrous mess wherein all of the vegetables exploded out of the taco and all over me. Looking back, I’d say the sleeve might be some strange, and not well thought out, finger protection device… as if Doritos dust was toxic or embarrassing or something. The moist towelette could’ve taken care of some Doritos flavored fingers, but not the cheese, lettuce, tomato and drips of meat-goo that actually ended up on me.

Lesson learned. Accept the moist towelette, toss the paper sleeve, get Dorito-ey fingers, eat taco without explosions.

Oh, and it didn’t taste bad… it was kind of exactly the combination of Doritos and Taco Bell that I expected. No surprises.

The band’s name is Lutz. Shows will be on my calendar. ReverbNation & Facebook. As I said, we’re in the studio, so there will be samples with me on them very soon!

It doesn’t rotate or stretch across the multiple homescreens, mostly due to the limitation of that Live Wallpaper Creator app that the script is based on, but if someone who really knows how to create live wallpapers is inspired to make a better one that does those things, please let me know!

The live wallpaper can be found here

Video from my first attempt

The source
The t-shirt

I might carve the words into the back side (ha!) tomorrow.

Not bad for my first decent attempt at a pumpkin, in years.

We started our trip with a drive through Indiana, the long way, until we reached the river that separates Kentucky and Indiana. There was nothing around except a cute little town every few miles… and this big-ass casino that we had booked a night at, in the hopes of a classy room and a little fun wasting some money playing slots. The slots were, indeed, fun, and we all managed to blow a few dollars and stay entertained for a couple of hours. I thought about trying my hand at roulette again, but the stakes were too high for me… $5 minimum… a far cry from the $1 (CAD) minimum in Montreal, where I did so well, all those years ago. We had a decent dinner at a cafe where fish swam behind our heads, but awoke to find the room even more dirty and stained than we originally observed… we put up a little fuss, in the morning, and they comped the room. They also promised us a letter worth a free weekend and $100 hotel credit… which turned out to be a letter worth one free night and $50. We’ll probably use it someday. The breakfast buffet was great… we understood how the crazy old casino addicts could play all day and then gorge themselves on the buffet food and make it worth the price.

Then we headed down to Nashville. I think that, even though I had prepared the google maps of our trip, it hadn’t really dawned on me that we were driving through Kentucky, until we started this leg of the trip. I remembered trying to figure out how close we were going to be to where EJ lived, when we chose the Smokies as our overall destination, but somehow, the fact that we were driving across the state had gone totally unnoticed. We stopped in one, clear tourist-trap-of-a-town and almost went on a tour through a cave, but decided that the time commitment involved wasn’t worth it. Then we stopped at a giant “rock & gift shop” that reminded me of that scene in Zombieland where they bust up a cheesy gift shop. We also took some pictures of the entranceway to Dinosaur World, but decided not to waste $13 per person to go inside. We made it to Nashville before dark and hooked up with our friend Jesse for dinner. He took us to a couple of cool places: a really nice cafe, that seemed off the beaten path a bit, and a bar on Broadway, where you’re supposed to go when you visit Nashville, I guess. We heard the “Honky Tonk-Heroes” play and I got my dose of country music.

Then we headed across Tennessee to our cabin in Pigeon Forge. Google took us on a long stretch of NOT-interstate which resulted in one police officer pulling us over and “cutting us a break” by writing us a ticket that had the words “*Pre-Trial” written on it…  and assuring us that we would pay less than the actual fine, though that amount isn’t actually written on there anywhere, so we’ll see what happens when I call to take care of it. We were a little stressed about our cabin rental office being closed by the time we got there… but the directions to our cabin were in a coded lock-box outside the office… the unpaved and extremely steep road up to the cabin probably would’ve been described better by a person than that sheet of paper could’ve ever done. It took us a couple tries to get up the last stretch of road. We ventured back down to stock the cabin with some food from Food City and picked up a movie at a Blockbuster Express kiosk.

The next day, we cruised around Gatlinburg, skipped right through the cheesy touristy section, and toured around the crafters’ section of town. There was one scary shop full of wood-carved stuff (including belts!), and the walls were covered with signed portraits of every past republican president and letters thanking them for their contributions… There was a slightly friendlier pedestrian mall full of shops at a cute little covered bridge; We had some good ice cream there. On our way out of town we stopped at Hillbilly Golf, which was a mini-golf course installed on the side of a hill where we took a chairlift up to the top and played our way down. We actually went to dinner  at a BBQ place, based on the Hillbilly attendant’s recommendation, and then came back to golf.

Our friend in Nashville recommended that we go to Ruby Falls. He talked about it like it was in the same town as our cabin, but it was really 2+ hours away. We were up for a little road trip, though, so we decided to trust his advice. The cave was pretty awesome and the history or the cave and the original cave beneath it was pretty cool. The falls themselves were impressive, but the “7 minutes” that you get there is not sufficient for a photographer. The castle that they built out of the rock they pulled out while digging the shaft for the elevator provides a nice view of Chattanooga and the winding river. We decided we were hungry, so I busted out the Yelp app on my phone and started reading off the nearby restaurants. “Pizza sounds good.” was the decision, so I found the closest pizza place with the most ratings and it happened to be the best freakin’ pizza that any of us have ever had, I think.

We tried to save the Smokies for the day that had the best weather predicted, so that our pictures would be pretty and any small hikes would be bearable. We drove into the national park and started up the mountains… we pulled off anytime we saw something picturesque and wandered a bit, took lots of pictures. We went all the way up to the North Carolina line and saw where the appalachian trail meets the scenic road we were on… then we headed up to Clingman’s Dome, which included a half-mile walk up a fairly steep grade. We were all pretty exhausted, but we made it and the views were awesome. We decided that we deserved a good meal, so we headed to this Apple-themed place… it had a long wait, but a good reputation. Unfortunately, our waitress left and handed our table off to someone who was far too busy and sort of left us with no food for a half an hour… again, we put up a bit of a fuss and they gave us lots of free stuff. On our way back to the cabin, we experienced the world’s largest As Seen On TV store… it was entertaining, and maybe a little sad, but definitely an experience.

Then we drove home… as if we hadn’t spent enough time in a car, the family agreed to indulge my 50-minute detour to the nearest Tim Horton’s. A few of the roads were “closed” on our 50-minute detour, but we drove on them anyway. I must have missed Tim’s coffee a lot, because it tasted amazing. It was also a nice break in the drive… somewhere a little past the half-way point.

A little ways into our first day of driving, we started choosing the music we would play alphabetically, by band. You can see some of our soundtrack on my last.fm page. We were missing a few letters, went back to a couple, a bit out of order, and some of them came from Sarah’s iPod, but if you’re curious, I could try and figure out what all letters were. The iPods all got a little time on the stereo… we replaced my noisy, clicking tape adapter on the ride home. The Mazda got new struts (covered under that extended warranty we bought with the cars… phew) right before the trip, so the car performed great. My phone was a champ, it managed to get us internet access in the cabin, guided us by GPS, everywhere that we went, and let me check in on Yelp all over the place and finding us good places to eat. Yelp and a couple other travel/review sites definitely had better recommendations that the silly guestbook in our cabin – for example, when it comes to pancake houses in the area: Flapjacks, no; Log Cabin, yes. The cameras all performed admirably. A few pics from mine are up at Flickr. We brought a handful of film cameras and haven’t developed anything from them, yet.

I want to believe the coffee-guy saw me running, because, clearly, his job is boring that early in the morning, and seeing someone run for a train is exciting. I even want to believe that he saw my glasses fly out of my bag and turned them into the ticket-guy. I’d also love to stretch the reality a bit and imagine that he thought about approaching me between the early train that I missed and my regular train to tell me something flew out of my bag, but decided not to, because I looked like Bruce Banner about to go hulk. The actual reality is probably that someone turned them in when they saw them in the parking lot and the ticket-seller just knew they were mine, somehow, and has a weird smile all the time… and coffee-guy gives a nod to anyone he thinks might buy from him again.

Whatever really happened, I now have a spare pair of sunglasses, since I went to lenscrafters on Saturday. I also have a spare pair of regular glasses from the Friday that they fell out of my pocket when the school bus that I was in jumped a curb. Those came back in the middle of the next week, in the same case that these sunglasses came back in… the one with the broken zipper-pull, maybe it’s a lucky case. But again, they didn’t quite come back fast enough for me not to replace them.

It’s weird to have spares for both, but I don’t think I should return either pair, knowing my luck and given the worn out condition of the 4-5 year old pairs that tried to get away.

I also took a trip down memory lane, earlier in the week, when an old ex-girlfriend apologized to me on facebook, in case she was ever heartless or selfish. She wasn’t and I told her so. It got me thinking about past relationships… there are a few people I should probably apologize to; I guess I have a few regrets, but I think I only really hold one grudge, maybe two. Facebook is certainly good for bringing up these random memories and feelings.

In other news, camp is almost over, though I got roped into an extra week. It’s going to be a low-enrollment/more chilled-out version of camp, but it’s still another week of getting up early and going to the city. My hope is that my seniority and 15+ years of camp experience will mean that I’m running the show as the fill-in director. My history in these matters is that I’m promised a director’s position and/or I fill in for one until a decision is made and then it isn’t given to me… no such promise was made this time, so maybe this will be the time it happens.

The commute to camp has been made much nicer, this summer, by the set of Ultimate Ears SuperFi 5vi that I picked up when they went on super-sale at Amazon. Unfortunately, the cord busted on the first set, so I had to get myself another set, but Logitech customer service got back to me about my complaint and replaced the first set for free… in the meantime, the cord started to separate, right at the jack, on the second set. I put some electrical tape on there to hold it together until the replacement set came. I’m hoping they replace them as well. The foam tips are the most comfortable, but it makes me sad that they fall apart after a week and half or so. I think my ear canals are too small or something because all of the various sized silicone tips irritate my ears a bit and seem to wiggle their way out. The cord is obviously cheap on this model, both have broken and it makes lots of contact-noise when I’m walking around, but if I ever upgrade to something better, I might look into those custom ear-molded ones.

I’m also still playing the music on my commutes from my iPod. I was hoping to be just be carrying the Droid. I am carrying an extra battery for the phone, so I don’t have that excuse anymore, and it’s not that it’s not capable, but the lack of gapless playback (for those few albums that really need it) or built-in volume normalization (for regular shuffle) or a shuffle-by-album option (for when I feel like reconnecting with my albums, which is most of the time) makes me continue to carry my iPod. There are alternative music apps that attempt to solve these issues (at least the gapless and shuffle by album), but none puts it all together. I’m sure that future versions of Android will get these features in, especially if the rumors are true and they start using android as an OS for a media-player type device. Will these features make it in before I upgrade to a new phone?

I’ve found the phone very difficult to use this summer. I’m not sure if it’s just too humid at my mostly-outside job, or if I sweat too much (likely) but the touchscreen gets all freaked out and thinks it’s being touched all over the place and renders the phone useless until I clean it off… and even then, I can only get good response from it for a few seconds until it starts freaking out again. If I go somewhere cool and dry (air conditioned) and give it some time to recover… and give myself some time to recover and not be so sweaty … it works just fine. This wasn’t an issue at all in the Winter and Spring; It will probably affect when I decide to upgrade to a new phone. I’ll be eligible for a bit of a discount in early July, and that humidity will just be starting to bother me again. So whatever awesome android phone is available on July 06, 2011, you can pretty much bet that I’ll be buying one. If it continues to happen on the next phone I own, I’ll have to seal my phone in a ziploc bag all summer, or something.

I’m pretty sure I have a legitimate use for the wireless tether feature of the Droid. We’ve booked ourselves a few days at a cabin in Gatlinburg, TN, in late September. The rental policy said something about having “local Knoxville area access numbers…” Dial-up? Awesome. I don’t think I know anyone in the area (unless EJ is still around there, somewhere), so this one is going to be pure vacation, for me, and no attempting to visit friends/family. That stuff will have to wait until sometime around the holidays. It’ll be one of the longer roadtrips we’ve done in the past couple years, and I’m excited about that.

Droid is now running a 2.2 build. It’s fast and I put Flash on there. Best part is being able to watch videos inline in Google Reader. All my music is showing up twice, but hopefully I’ll find a fix for that. I’m not really using the droid for music playing until they implement gapless playback or a soundcheck-like volume normalizing feature and/or the ability to shuffle by album.

WordPress is now at 3.0. Haven’t noticed any differences (unless crossposting doesn’t work when I publish this), except a couple memory errors in my dashboard… I didn’t really need to read the wordpress development news.

And now, to take advantage of the rest of my day off… I think we’ll be playing Lego Harry Potter.

bad news: A1C tests usually mean blood samples taken with a needle and a big bruising scar that lasts for days.
good news: today’s A1C came from the same finger prick they used to test my current blood sugar and was ready in 6 minutes.

bad news: I had to fast for this appontment today and hadn’t eaten since 8.30 last night.
good news: panera bread on the way to the red line (with free wifi)

bad news: I’m not done with the stats for work, yet
good news: I’m downtown for the study appointment, so I can swing by the office and get the stuff I’m missing, hopefully.

bad news: between major seasons, so not much work besides finishing the stats.
good news: picked up a few days at a couple other teams courses and met people and have heard from even more courses who want me to work for them.

bad news: it was raining this morning and I had at least one 10 minute walk on the schedule.
good news: the sun is out.

In other news, I got on the list at a couple more teams courses and hopefully I’ll be picking up more work. Already lined up a few days in between the usual season and summer camp. Hooray!