Archive for December, 2008
21 Dec
Weekends in Wistucky — at least at the Casa del Beest — tend to be a lot about food. We have more time (and more energy!) to think about what to make and how to create it. That’s all by way of explaining how we ate a stick of butter for breakfast today.
The Wife and I were talking about going to the Glow, but we’re in the middle of a winter storm out here. Wind chill is in the vicinity of -20 (F) and we’re looking at another foot or so of snow on top of the foot we already have when all is said and done tomorrow. The roads are passible, but not great. We’re also out of eggs, so the usual spectacular, multi-story omelet bracketed by potatoes and toast was out of the question.
Once we whittled our options down, we settled on biscuits and gravy. I’ve been making scratch biscuits for ten years, but I’ve pretty much always used an egg to hold things together. The biscuits have always been good (fairly flaky and tender and golden), but not up to the standards of a Georgia truck-stop.
Today, though, that changed. After checking out suggestions from a handful of sites (cooks.com, epicurious.com, cookingforengineers.com), I made some “buttermilk” (a little lemon juice in the milk), used that and a little more butter than usual, and whipped up my biscuits, then half-carmalized some onions and garlic in butter as the base of a white sauce to which I eventually added a can of Cambell’s cream of mushroom soup.
And then there was breakfast. And it was good. All 2,000+ calories of it. mmmmmm… calories…
20 Dec
My grandparents in Texas just got a Skype account and a webcam and put it all together tonight while my Dad and uncle were visiting. Once we got a couple little kinks ironed out, we had a really nice video chat. Once The Wife wanted to join in from her computer, we moved the conversation to oovoo since Skype doesn’t offer more than two-way video conferencing.
This was the first time I’ve used oovoo for more than one-to-one chatting, and it was pretty good. We had some static bursts on the line, but I think they were from The Wife and I both running sessions from the same IP address. I’m sure there’s something we can do about that internally (maybe some clever port forwarding; Omar, do you have any advice?), but not tonight.
Last night at my gig (which went reasonably well, except for “Jingle Bells,” of all damn things), I played with Qik.com which let me stream video live from my mobile device. That was also totally cool. The only problem there was that, not surprisingly, streaming video just decimated the battery on my phone. Other than that, though, Qik (and especially the Windows mobile client) couldn’t have been any easier to use. That’s a solid three thumbs up! Especially from a couple coworkers I ambushed…
19 Dec
I’ve been a bad boy, what basically ignoring this blog for the last however long. Again. But now I’m done. Done ignoring the blog, and more importantly, done with the additional workload of teaching a couple classes at Northland. So that means I can start again. Here we go with a little retrospective:
Time sinks
This fall I’ve been working my regular full-time job at Bayfield County, disolving one side company while simultaneously building another, all while teaching four credits (a jazz history class and a jazz ensemble) at Northland College. I’ve learned a couple things:
- I now have a better idea of when to say when re: commitments
- Building a business (even a teeny one like mine) takes a lot more time than there is in any given day
- While teachers, even at the college level still have it hard, they can still choose to be heroes or villains. Or, as is more often the case, they just get beat down and want to get the hell out of dodge.
Writing on the Wall
I’ve also learned that Northland College is *so* screwed. Enrollment is *still* down and the administration is scrambling to get money pretty much anyway it can. One of the upshots of this is that it seems like these days, they’re accepting almost anyone who can manage to fill out an application and come up with $120k for four years’ tuition. Oh sure, there are some smart kids on campus, but I had a couple in my class that could have been poster children for social promotion. Once they and their brethren get into the world and start representing a “Northland Education,” that’ll start a feedback loop that isn’t easily broken.
2 Dec
Last night, The Wife asked me to take a look at a website project she’s working on. Specifically, she was having trouble getting a sprite-based CSS image replacement navigation bar working properly. Being an appropriately geeky hubby, I said, “Sure, no problem.”
And true enough, it wasn’t a problem. For IE 7. Or Opera. Or Safari. But Firefox borked on my code no matter what I tried. *borkborkbork*
Is it me or did Hell just get ten degrees cooler?
