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A few weeks ago I made Eggs Benedict for VC. To do so, I had to plan in advance, learning how to (this’ll show you how much effort I normally spend in the kitchen) clarify butter, make poached eggs, and make hollandaise sauce. It took me almost a dozen eggs to make a good poached egg. But now I know! The hollandaise sauce wasn’t difficult. I got it right the first time but it sure is time consuming. 20 minutes of “constant stirring” is a bother. So this week I tried hollandaise sauce from a mix.

Concord Foods Hollandaise Sauce Mix. “Simply Add water and cook”

It cooks quick enough…. 1 cup of warm water in a sauce pan, add the packet, set to medium-low heat, 6 minutes of constant stirring later and it had thickened.

But for taste it kind of fell flat. It -looks- perfect. Right-on consistancy & color. And it doesn’t taste bad, it just doesn’t jump out at you and say, “I am hollandaise, love and cherish me!” I don’t know, maybe my taste buds were biased by the amount of time they knew was put into real hollandaise. Maybe if I added a little clarified butter and lemon to perk it up. Yeah, thinking about it, I think it was seriously lacking in the tangy-lemon department.

I might try it again sometime but I’ll definitely have to fiddle with the flavor to make it work. That takes away from the ease of use, though if worked correctly, it could still save 15 minutes and setting up that odd double-steamer setup for authentic hollandaise.

For now, out of 5, I give it:
Appearance: 5
Taste: 2

Picasa 2.0 kicks butt. I found the original Picasa a few years ago and loved it. I’ve only been playing with the latest version for an hour or so but it looks like they’ve cleaned up all the shortcomings of the original software and then some. And the best part is, it’s FREE! Google bought the Picasa company and is giving it all away. It looks like their strategy is to get ahead by being a part of the picture making process and being a preferred (but not required) vendor for some photo related services. Darn it, they hope to get ahead by being the best. And I think it might just work.

Get Picasa.

PS. I want to know who wrote the readme.htm. It is wonderfuly written. Uplifting, conversational, tremendously informative, witty without being smarmy, well laid out… The damn thing is a model of what a readme should be.

I include the readme after the cut.

Continue reading ‘Picasa 2: goodness’ »

Halflife 2 is an AMAZING game.

First, the realism is just… unreal. I could gush about that for a long time. The physics are so realistic and the texturemaps and polygons and… [gush gush]

The gameplay is terrific too. I’m occationally a little miffed that the game designers push me “down the tube” in a linear fashion, but I forgive them for the plots they put me into. I’m put in the place of a reluctant hero, struggling to survive and occationally kicking some bad-guy butt.

I’ve tried a few times to write a story about my adventures… but they just don’t hold a candle to the experience of actually being there. Yow, I just said that I was “actually” in a place that doesn’t exist. Metaverse, here we come!

With Stevie! They were fantastic. Stevie said it was the best concert he had ever been to. We both got excited and nervous at the same time when they opened with a medley of old tunes that we both knew and loved. “Uh oh. Is this one song their homage to the first 15 years of the band? Is the rest of the concert going to be jammed with stuff we’ve never heard?” Well, we weren’t disappointed in the slightest. The show was a mix of old and new and darnit if every single song they played sounded like a super-hit to my ears. It was like a 3 hr “Best of” show…. Most bands don’t have 3 hours of best-of material. But they did! :-)

After intermission, their second song was Tom Sawyer, I called Trav (who should have gone, he really should have) and held up the phone. It sounded a little like this.

Rush at Saratoga Springs, Monday August 9th, 2004!

Don’t they sound great on my cell phone?

The bike for Burning Man is sweet. It’s in my back seat right now. From the ad:

MOUNTAIN BIKE, 7 spd Trek, Antelope 820, used 3 times $99.

(It’s actually a 21 speed, but that’s ok) And it was exactly as advertised.

Outlook 2000 had a tiny little feature whereby when your mouse hovered over a web link, the target would appear in the status bar down at the bottom of the window. Outlook 2002 eliminated this feature, making forged emails like this (at right. Click
to enlarge) possible.

The link on that email takes you to this web page (at left). Everything appears to be all on the up and up, right? Wrong. Look closely at that web page… at the top of the email. The address is “http://63.203.30.222/registration/Verify.htm” That isn’t a Paypal address. It’s a thief’s address.

If Outlook hadn’t gotten rid of that little feature, it would have been harder to pull the wool over people’s eyes on this kind of scam. Hmmm…. I’ve been hearing how Microsoft is pushing for an email postage/verification/something system lately. Am I just a wacky conspiracy theorist by suggesting that Microsoft is crippling their own program in order to make their new email verification system more necessary? No, that’s crazy.

It was initially a pain to organize but I’m so glad that I finally got to see Robot Stories with friends! The initial plan was to see it on opening night at The Cinema Village theater in NYC. I had sent out emails and organized so that about 5 friends and I would go to the 7:40 show. River was a late comer so he tried to get a ticket online. But it was sold out. It’s a good thing he emailed me that because I didn’t have tickets yet! I was going to go all the way into the city and meet for dinner just to find out I couldn’t get into the show! Both shows were sold out on opening night so we had to reschedule. Another round of invites went out for the Wednesday 7:40 show. Glenn, Shara, Jim D, Marian, and Marah said “yes”.

What a great evening! It started out with a minor miracle… I found a place to park on 3rd between 11th & 12th. But I realized that I didn’t have any quarters for the meter. A guy parked right next to me so I got out and asked to buy quarters from him. I looked in my wallet and frowned as I noticed that all I had were $20s. He gave me a quarter… yes, that’s right gave me a quarter and suggested that I use the 15 minutes to find more quarters. :-)

I got some quarters at a costume & magic shop right nearby (I’ll have to go back, they had fun things). I walked to the theater and noticed that there was free street parking right in front of the theater starting at 6pm. At 5:40, no one had shown up so I fetched my car and sat in it ’til 6. I parked right in front of the theater!

Glenn showed up at 6 and we met in front of the theater. We walked to the restaurant and met up with Marian and Marah. Dinner was just peachy. The talk was really nice. It’s nice to be social! We went off to the theater and met Jim in front. In we went. We were there 10 minutes before showtime and the theater was packed! There were only about 180 seats or so but.. it was packed! We found 6 seats in the first and second row.

I spent New Years eve in Philadelphia. Saw fireworks right up close! I was there with PPG and several PP friends. PPG’s Sw has an apartment right on the river (no, literally. If you drilled a hole in his living room, you’d hit a parking level and then water!) The party itself was a bit low key for my taste, but the apartment is lovely. Red curtain, amazing modular wall storage up to 18 feet, rice paper lighting, and a winch-operated table!

I saw it Saturday night in the city with M&M Sprague & PPG.

What an amazing movie.
– They actually built Minas Tirith! Well, of course they didn’t physically build the whole thing… some parts only exist in a computer. But they still designed every inch of the place!
– I felt Tolkien’s “alternate psychology” so much more intensely when seeing it than when reading. (IE: Gollum and Sam are physical representations of different aspects of Frodo. Denethor represents a Tolkienian archetype)
– I’ll go so far as to say that ROTK (and the other 2 movies… especially combined) is a solid contender to replace the original Star Wars as the Zeus in the pantheon of movie greats.

Friday night: Saw my good friend Marian Heller at Don’t Tell Mama. I (of course) got there a few minutes late AGAIN. I videotaped most of her show. Afterward, Marian, her friend Lisa, her new friend Don K. and myself went out to a very nice meal a few blocks north. NYC restaurants all try so hard to impress… and I’m so easily impressed. :-) Then we went off to Deutch’s Halloween party on 27th and 3rd. The party wasn’t to my liking. I went back to Marian’s after the party. Parking was (miraculously) not a problem near her apartment. Good sleepy-time conversation and a good night’s rest later, Saturday began.

Saturday: Back home for a breather and a nap. Then off to pick up my tuxedo in Woodbridge (see below). Off to pick up PPG. We were off to her company’s owner’s Halloween masquerade party. Wow. The place was wow. I felt like we were in a James Bond movie or at the new Bellagio hotel. One thing I’ll remember is the aquarium (10′ long x 6′ high x 5′ deep) with all manner of fish. For the first time, it didn’t look like “animals in a cage”. The sheer opulence of the whole place, the small section of wall in the dining room that wasn’t painted (oop! I -am- after all a QA guy at heart), The secluded walk around the back of the house. The most delicate chocolate mousse I’ve ever had in my life. I could go on listing… food, band, dancing, easy laughing, enticing the waitstaff, pewter glasses, cosmopolitans…

Sunday: After coming home from the party and sleeping in Edison, we packed up her itty bitty room and moved it all to her new place in Metro 2409! The place is terrific. It doesn’t have a movie theater, pool room, and bowling alley, but it -does- have wonderful country lines and angles, entirely new everything, a white picket fence, a warm homey feeling, a lovely backyard, and a short walk to Everything! We had dinner at Down to Earth in Metro 2409. I hope I never forget the powerful warm “everything is going to be alright” feeling we shared while sitting in the corner in the candle-light, eating chocolate cake.