Mmmm, Stuffing

This year we stayed home for Thanksgiving and made almost everything. All was tasty.

View the Slideshow

Pre-Thanksgiving Warmup

Having no nearby invitations for Thursday's big meal, B and I decided on Friday that we should try our hand at doing the whole thing for ourselves (plus one turkey-crazy cat). So we filled up the propane tank, assembled a menu, made a special trip to Providence to get some needed equipment, and did most of the grocery shopping. B has also done a lot of internet research on how to handle turkey. Neither of us has ever cooked a turkey before, and I am an off-the-wagon-for-the-holidays-only vegetarian, so this will be a big adventure. And no, we are not going to deep-fry it.

Items on the menu include: one 13-lb turkey (the smallest available on Sat.), gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans w/ mustard seed, salad, cranberry-orange relish, vanilla ice cream, and pumpkin pie. Mmmm...pie.

Hopefully the leftovers will last us all the way through until we leave town for AGU.

Riding to Pont Judith Lighthouse

Labor Day afternoon, Kt and I rode down to Point Judith Lighthouse. We had quite a strong seabreeze headed down to Lighthouse, but we eventually made it desipte the clam shacks and lack of a shoulder on the last mile or so of the road. We hung out for a bit then proceeded to head up towards Narragansett. It was a beautiful day for a ride and much easier to get back with the wind at our backs. We also stopped for some fries at a clam shack in Narragansett, small but cripsy and tasty.

We will probably try the new posta maker with a recipe from The French Laundry Cookbook tonight. Possibly the sweet potato one. Mmmmmm.

Does America Run on Dunkin ?

Not all of America. I think it would have been easy to explain that the Americas, North and South, do not Run on Dunkin Donuts. Now, does the United States of America run on Dunkin Donuts. That is another question. Well, the answer again is no. As I heard on a plane,

"The only thing wrong with California is that there are no Dunkin Donuts."

Besides the insaneness of that statement, it is technically correct. I decided to find out who actually runs on Dunkin. After getting all of the current (July 2007) locations from the Dunkin Donuts website, it appears from the image below that New England, New York, and Chicago run on Dunkin. Orange dots are single locations and the pinky dots are high density Dunkin Donuts locales. There are none in California, but that is not the only problem.

Walletless

Katie is gone for the weekend doing some experiments at some fancy lab. I had some major plans to cook some interesting and new food while she was gone due to all the extra time I was going to have, or I really should say, all of the extra time I was going to have to fill since she would not be there. Nuts to that.
I managed to leave my wallet in Katie's car and it left with her to help with the fancy experiments. Now from Thursday to Monday, I have no ID, driver's license, credit cards, ATM cards, and no real way to get money besides the cash I have on hand. I could use a check but would probably need an ID as well.
So I have been riding my bike to work, as I should have been doing, and I have been watching my spending very closely. No beer runs and no fancy dinners for me, although I could probably afford a trip to Phil's this weekend if I go before 7am and get the special for $1.50. Mmmmmm.

iPhone

This last weekend, we traveled up north to the Mall. It was soooo far, like 30 minutes away. After doing some much needed shopping we wandered into the Apple store and went directly to the iPhone. It was a pretty slick piece of electronics. The sound quality of the phone was pretty good for inside the store and I think one of us may be getting one within the next year or so. We may have to wait for AT&T's wireless network to improve before getting one.

Everything else about it was really cool, besides the fact it was a phone. The maps, calendar, address book, and the mail was pretty neat to a lesser extent. It was also pretty nifffffty as it had an ipod with cover flow and such. The best part will be the syncing of all the important info from a usable application rather than a dumb one provided by the phone maker or not having one at all.

Ugh, Morgan

Which would you rather do:

• List to Mr. Morgan do color commentary during ESPN/Baseball
• Listen to the game on the radio 5 seconds ahead the TV

That was our quandary. We choose the second. Neither of us can stand Mr. Morgan. By the way, some of us also do not like Mr. Buck on FOX, I actually like him. Gimme Jerry and Don, or Kruk and Kuip, or ... How did are these people picked to do nationally televised games?

Now this is announcing: "Have some pizza!"

Baseball Time

Ah Baseball season is here again. While I was home the last time my brother pointed me to a group that follows baseball in a different way. I was aware of the "statistics nuts" that were constantly referenced during baseball games commentary and other people complaining about "How many bases Ricky Henderson stole during night games while up by more than 4 or more runs during Passover ?" But some of the things are actually quite interesting, especially if you are just a bit mathematically inclined or want more to emerse yourself in everything baseball.

I was also a bit disappointed when one the OSX Dashboard Widgets I used during last year's baseball season to watch and follow all the teams I care about, yes there are three, stopped working. So I decided to make a widget of my own to replace the broken one. One of the things I added to my version was the determination of Win Probability and graphing that during the game. Here are some pics:
The score, count and bases are all there, just like the previous widget, but I added the pitcher, batter on the right and the team which is currently at bat. Finally there is a gauge which tells you probability of the home team of winning.
If you double click on the widget, it expands and shows the graph of win probability for each batter that is up for the entire game. If you run the mouse over one of those little red or black boxes, it will tell you the play that made the win probability change in a little box. And there is also a back so you can select the game you want and change the "importance" of the play to display those little play boxes.

Clothes out of the Dryer

For the last few (4) weeks, we have been without a washer and dryer, and hence clean clothes. We normally do clothes on a every other week basis, but since the washing machine died about 4 weeks ago due a leak in the tub and killing the motor we have had to do without. It is amazing the kinds of stuff you will wear when you are trying to stretch your wearable clothes. Last weekend, we made a special trip to the mall, which is about 45 minutes away, to pick up necessary delicates. We finally this week got the new washing machine and dryer. It is one of the new high efficiency machines and is very quite and uses very little water, plus the dryer finishes in about the same time as the washing machine. Ahhh, clean clothes.

Poorman's Implementation of Multi-Processing

Ages ago I wrote a small little program pimp.pl (Poorman's Implementation of Multi-Processing). Stupid little thing, it allowed me to run multiple programs on multiple computers at the same time. It was a improvement of a program that was written by myself and loads of help from my CS roommate while I was at Berkeley. When I added some improvements, I also added a queue system and came up with pimp-queue.pl. Now I could run using more commands than available computers and the remaining commands would just queue up.

According to this, I never update this thing. I think someone was trying to force me to post again. Well, I was up early this morning to take Katie to the airport so she could get to Japan for a meeting. I had some breakfast and then went to work. I read this post and was intrigued. I tried it, or better yet I tried to make it work. Sorry google, first it didn't work, I modfied the source and got it to work and then found it clunky to use. What was I suppose to do with it. Yeah, I could post from my text editor, but I can do it much more easily in my web browser.

I spent a good bit of my morning trying to make it work, when I should have been working on what I inteded to do: work. So to help out the reason for my time sink this morning, I point hime to this extension for vi.

So the answer is No. No I will not post, at least with emacs client for blogger.

Forecasting

No, not earthquakes. Weather. A self-titled OmniNerd, again not me, decided to determine which ISH based weather service was serving up the most accurate forecasts. While the main sources like weather.com and accuweather.com did a pretty good job, some others like MSN did not.

Internet Weather Forecast Accuracy

While reading some comments from the linking site, I came across this gem:

For in stats, as in ethics, the n's do justify the means.

Ha! Delicious.

WRXoom

The car has arrived. An entire suite of pictures and notes about the pictures can be found here or if you just want to look at the shiny new car, try the slideshow.

A complete overview is at Subaru.com, and a quick one is below

Standard Features:

• 224-hp 2.5-liter DOHC intercooled, turbocharged SUBARU BOXER engine
• 226 lb-ft of torque at 3,600 rpm
• Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive
• MPG: (manual) 20 city / 27 highway
  
• Projector-beam halogen fog lights
• Sport-design instrumentation with center-mounted tachometer
• Leather-wrapped 3-spoke steering wheel with manually adjustable tilt column
• Performance-design front seats with fixed integrated head restraints
• 120-watt 6-speaker audio system with 6-disc CD changer and MP3 capability
• Auxiliary audio jack

Non-Standard Features

• Rear Differential Protector
• Gary Busey Helmet Protector Protector
• Auto-dimming Mirror and Compass
• All Weather Floor Mats

Birthday Bonanza

Some very sweet people got some incredibly nice things for my birthday. The best part is they all work together to form something completely awesome.

I got a set of really nice speakers which were placed in the kitchen and a Airport Express which was plugged into the wall near the speakers. The Airport Express is really nice because it allows me to stream music from my computer to it and then on to the speakers. No more connecting wires or hauling the computer with the so-so speakers to the kitchen. So nice.

Didn't think that would happen

% ssh somewhere.important.edu
shell: segmentation fault ssh somewhere.important.edu

This was after I installed an update for OS X today on my work computer. I had to go and install a new version of OpenSSH to fix the problem. Not entirely sure what happened, but it really sucks when the program you use every single minute stops working. I think it was a library issue but this should have been checked for. I am not really sure why OS X is using an older version of OpenSSH, but oh well. Hrrrrumph.

% ./configure --prefix=/sw --with-ssl-dir=/sw --with-pam --with-tcp-wrappers --with-ipaddr-display --with-libedit
% make
% sudo make install

You say Ka, I say WRX

This last weekend, I went out to purchase a Ka, sorry a Car. I had decided on the type and options, plus about how much I wanted to spend. With the help of Katie and helpful advise of Consumer Reports we were all ready to haggle properly. I knew my starting price and the price I really wanted to pay, but the dealer undercut me and offered the car at invoice, or what they paid for it.

Now I have not gotten the car yet as the dealer is searching New England for the specific car that I want. I should get the new car sometime this week as well as pics. More specifics to follow as well.

Here is the Car I will be getting, but mine will be Dark Gray and will not corner as well or go as fast. Probably a good thing, I don't need to get to work in under a minute.

Holiday Wrapup

Much traveling and sleeping in foreign beds lately. Last week was spent at AGU in San Francisco. We stayed across the street from the Marriott. It was ok, but the bed was a little hard and there was a TV attached to it. I meet with lots of old friend from grad and undergrad as well as other meeting I have attended in the past.

After the tiring meeting, it was back home for a few days to tie up some loose end, like finals, grades, and reimbursement. Then it was back out to the west coast. We flew through Atlanta. I hate that airport. What kind of airport allows smoking inside. Smoking lounges are "seperated" from the rest of the airport by a sliding glass door. I have seen the doors propped open, people standing in the doors keeping them open, and a cone in front of the door (for what reason, I do not know). I have also walked in front of the door only to have to open and receive a refreshing breath of second-hand smoke. Thanks Atlanta. I would gladly pay an extra $250 per flight to avoid being routed through your smoky facilities. Oh, and don't get me started about the beeping, "beeping", beeping carts.

We finally made it to Oregon and had a nice dinner at the Portland airport. For those not in the know, the Portland airport (PDX) is smoke free, has free wireless, and is rather quiet (as airports go). The last few days have been spent relaxing on the couch waiting for packages to arrive for x-mas. We will be off to California next week for more holiday festivities.

Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Commercial

I cannot seem to watch the Thanksgiving Day "Parade" without getting grumpy. It happened last year and it happened again this year. I think my two biggest problems with the "parade" are it is a kinda half parade, half street show and it is just a big commercial. What commercialism ?: first, it is called Macy*s blah blah; second, the current Broadway musicals put on their numbers to advertise themselves; third, most floats are sponsored by some company with the exception of a few; fourth, the channel covering the "parade" decided to bring on actors from their current crop of shows to advertise them, and not show the floats and balloons. If you are going to cover the "parade", cover the "parade". The funky "parade" structure also bothers me. With the singing and dancing coming before the "parade" starts, actually an hour before it starts. The whole thing just seems a bit stupid to me. But the dog show is on afterwards.

Oh, the markets in The Ocean State and The Turkey State are closed on Thanksgiving. The people here take their Turkey Day seriously.

You Drink, You Type, You Spill

Well, it happened again. I was working at my computer having a nice warm cup o' joe. I turned to my left to look at my laptop, then decided I would do something else on my desktop machine. I am a multi-tasker, you see. I went for the mouse quickly, and without looking. Nothing is *ever* in the way, why look. *Smack* *Clunk* *Clunk* *Glug* *Glug*. There goes the coffee, Nooooo-ooooooo. Sh*t, now I have coffee on my keyboard and mouse. Quick, Clean, Clean, Quickly Clean, Save the Mouse, The Keyboard. Get all the liquid off the mouse, Now the keyboard. Phewww, mostly clean and dry now. Awwww Sh*t, the space bar doesn't work now, either do portions of my keypad and pressing "k" now produces "k;", the "l" key doesn't work either.

I have two choices. Fix the keyboard or get a new one. I didn't have the tools on hand or even at home to completely take apart the keyboard. It would also take a while, probably a week to get it fixed, that is if I could fix it. I give up.

I called up Apple for support. They told me I needed a new keyboard, but it is not covered under my warranty because *I* spilled the coffee. I guess if my computer spilled coffee on its keyboard Apple would replace it. That is fine, it was like $40 for a new one. I was told it was going to be 3-5 business days until I get the replacement. I guess I deserve that too for spilling the coffee.

This has happened numerous times before. Lets see I can add coffee to the ever growing liquids I have spilled on my keyboard:

Coffee - Once
Tea - Like three times and with many more near misses.
Coke (in a real glass bottle, one of those tall ones, not the short ones) - Twice

This morning around 11, my new keyboard got delivered. Wow, that was faster than NetFlix. Sweet. Thanks Apple, you have made my life better once again. Now I need to learn not to put liquids near my arms, hands, and mouse.

CAP Movie Reviews

CAP, what is CAP ? See on boingboing.net and blog.wfmu.org, we have the ChildCare Action Project (CAP) Christian Analysis of American Culture (CAAC) Movie Reviews. Reading throught the reviews are, one might say, hill-airrrr-e-us. South Park and Sin City are great. They also have final scores infleuence density, with the lower the final score the worse and the higher the influence density the worse. South Park got a density score of 10.65 and Sin City got a score of 0.0. Now I am sorry I missed Sin City. Here is a breakdown of the scores in histogram form. The top is the final score and the bottom is the infleuence density. Hmmm, interesting.