Category Archives: Life

Baking!

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Life has been pretty awesome lately.
I recently bought plane tickets for Carnival. I’ll be in Pittsburgh April 10 through April 18.

Last night was baking and Rock Band at Sharon’s. I tried making Elephant Ears using this recipe and they turned out pretty awesome. I also made cinnamon cookies and they turned out pretty tasty (not greasy at all, because I didn’t use very much butter).

Elephant Ears

1/4 c butter (actually more like 1/8 is sufficient)
1 c flour
5 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 c milk
1 tsp cinnamon

Melt butter. Mix flour, 2 tbsp sugar, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Stir in milk and 3 tbsp butter.

Flour surface, knead dough a few times, then roll out. Brush with remaining butter and sprinkle with 3 tbsp sugar and cinnamon.

Roll up dough, cut into four pieces, place onto cookie sheet (cut end up) and flatten into cookie-like shapes. Bake at 425 for 10 minutes.


Cinnamon cookies:
1 c sugar
1/8 c butter
1 egg
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 c flour
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Mix everything together to form dough. Form into 1/2-inch balls and place on cookie sheet. Bake at 350 for 10 minutes.


Mmm chicken

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I made tasty chicken today. It was really easy too.

1 chicken quarter (or breast, or two drumsticks)
One medium can crushed tomatoes
1/2 cup Southwestern mix frozen vegetables (corn, beans, red and green peppers)
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup uncooked rice
Spices to taste

Place chicken, tomatoes, veggies, water, and spices into a pot. Simmer on low heat for at least 5 hours (mine simmered for 8). About an hour before serving, add uncooked rice. Continue simmering.

Serves two.



Om nom nom nom. :D

Japanese food and karaoke

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Yesterday was a very nice departure from the normal monotony.
There was awesome Japanese food at Kappou Gomi.



Then there was real karaoke at Do Re Mi (where we, of course, did “Don’t Stop Believin'”) followed by Karaoke Revolution at Sharon’s/Charles’ apartment.

More photos are here.
Many, many thanks to Sharon and Charles for organizing things.

I also made a few tasty things yesterday. I experimented with peanut butter and jelly brownies. They didn’t end up half bad, although the jelly kind of crystalized and got rather strange to eat. I also made mac and cheese with veggies… pretty basic and easy, but tasty. I also bought like a pound of deli turkey to snack on, and it’s already over half gone. Mmm meat.

Today will be awesome tasty Mexican food for lunch.

I’m feeling much better. :)

Awesome and Crappy

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Today’s bit of awesome comes to you courtesy of AIM’s OSCAR protocol spec, and courtesy of Ian.

The spec defines a message type SNAC for sending protocol messages.
And what do they call the different kinds of SNACs? Why, foodgroups, of course.

Also, the error codes:

TOO_EVIL_SENDER  	17	Sender is too evil
TOO_EVIL_RECEIVER	18	Receiver is too evil

(where “evil” is the warning level of the user… remember when you used to have warning wars?)

Today’s little bit of crappyness comes to me courtesy of Bank of America.

I found some games on Amazon that I wanted to buy this morning around 8:45. Didn’t bring my wallet to work today, but that wasn’t a problem because my BoA credit card has the ShopSafe feature, where I can generate temporary credit card numbers for online use.
I log in to the site, however, and find that my credit card details are “temporarily unavailable.” Naturally, there is no other way to access ShopSafe other than through the details. So I wait.
Three and a half hours later, details are still unavailable, and the items have almost sold out. I finally get Greg to buy the items for me, paying about $10 more than I would have at 8:45. (For a final price of $28, $10 is very significant :P)
This is absolute crap. If you’re going to have downtime, you should send out notifications (which they never do) or at least have your downtime during times when people aren’t going to be trying to access credit card details (like 2 AM or something). This isn’t the first time either… I find that once or twice a week, my credit card details are unavailable (usually at similarly inconvenient times like early evening).
*sigh*
I hate BoA so much. Why do I use them?

VM Fail, Take Two

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So the last time I messed with my VM, I needed IT to come and build a new VM for me to use.
You think I would have learned better than to mess around with vmware when everything was working mostly fine.

This morning, I came in to work to a perfectly working VM and everything was fine. However, ever since IT had gotten me to install VMWare Player to create my new VM, I hadn’t been able to use VMWare Server. I figured I would remedy this.

First step was straightforward enough… uninstall VMWare Player. Unfortunately, it seems that doing so also uninstalled VMWare Server. Fine, whatever.

Second step then became to reinstall VMWare Server. This didn’t quite work… apparently I’m missing a couple kernel source files. As a result, it was unable to build the VSOCK module. This meant that my VMs, when run through VMWare Server, had no network access. This is a problem when the entire point of your VM is to run tests remotely.

After trying without success to sync the required source files, I figured I’d cut my losses and go back to the player. Uninstalled VMWare Server and reinstalled VMWare Player.

This install didn’t quite work right. It didn’t create the shortcut in my Applications menu, which I tried to do. Then, on launching, it was unable to read some required files to start up unless I ran it with sudo. In the end, I decided to just tell the shortcut to sudo it, because I didn’t want to start chowning the actual VM files.

So yeah. That took most of the morning and resulted in a less-usable Player (have to run with sudo now). Blah.

I am not touching my VM again for a while. :P