Author Archives: bluedepth

Great Cuppa

Posted on by
Reply

It struck me that a lot of people might not know how to get into Tea like we have. I think a basic guide is in order to help everyone get going when exploring this wonderful new world that has opened up for us. The cost to get off the ground is very low and a lot of these hints will save you a lot of time and aggravation. I’ll break it down into parts you need, many of them are durable, and ingredients, then procedure to make a spectacular cup of tea (or coffee even) cup-by-cup.

What you will need:

1) Tap water is best if you trust it. Spring water if you don’t. Avoid special waters like SmartWater or squeaky clean like vapor distilled water. If you are loath to buy your water in a jug, then Brita or Pur is your next best bet. You want your water to be freshly drawn, but it’s not essential.

2) Boiling Kettle – It’s romantic to get a teapot and put it on the stove and wait for it to whistle. This doesn’t conserve resources and is expensive in natural gas terms to run. A far better (and safer) alternative is the electric automatic boiling kettle. The model I am fond of is the one I have at work, that’s the basic plain-jane Rival Electric Kettle. I bought it at Walmart for $12. You only need one that can boil water and turn off. If you wanted to get really frou frou about it, a kettle with a thermometer that could keep water at 200 would be ideal.

3) Next you need a Finum Brewing Basket. This item is really durable. It’s got a superfine mesh which you can put your loose tea or coffee in and then insert that into your favorite cup. It has a lid which you can use to top the device to keep heat from leaking out or you can use it to receive the basket after you pull it out of the hot water in the cup. Or both. It washes up with tapwater and needs no other cleaning. Be gentle with fingertips and avoid scratching it with fingernails. If you have tea or coffee compacted in this basket, you can tip it upside down over the trash and tap the bottom with a spoon and everything will come out neat as you please.

4) Cups. If you have a mug or cup you like, use it. Preferably no more than 6 to 8 ounces. A standard coffee mug will work just fine. You know it’s sized right when you put the Finum in it, the little plastic wings rest of the edges of the cup and the bottom barely if ever touches the bottom of the cup. I can really recommend Bodum Bistro Double-Wall Mugs for this, if you have a little to spend on nice cups. Bodum mugs are made of borosilicate glass, they are double-walled and insulate to keep your fingers from burning, they retain heat very well, and they clean up in a snap. They are also totally non-reactive.

5) Timer. You need any basic timer. Your iPhone has one built in, other phones do too. You need a way to reliably countdown from 3 minutes to zero for tea or 4 minutes to zero for coffee. If you can do that, you can also set your timer to 11m30s which is how long just-off-the-boil water takes to get from scalding to drinkable.

6) Looseleaf Tea or Coffee. You can get all your looseleaf tea mail ordered from our shop here in Portage Michigan. The shop’s name is Chocolatea and they have an online store with shipping options. Everything they sell is top-quality and I can personally vouch that if you buy from them, you will enjoy every minute of what you get in the mail. Tea is not like coffee. Tea isn’t a ticking time bomb. It doesn’t get crappy with age and it can keep for a really long time without degrading in quality. One tea, Pu-erh actually ages like wine and gets better with age, however the Pu-erh that Chocolatea sells is ready-to-rock-and-roll, so you don’t have to wait to enjoy it. If Coffee is more your thing I can recommend Dunkin Donuts Regular Roast as an acceptable coffee. Starbucks is okay, but it’s way too expensive for eh coffee. Really great coffee, at least that I’ve found can be ordered online from Death Wish Coffee. I can also personally vouch for this coffee as it is exceptional in character and packs a wallop of caffeine.

7) Gram Scale. There is a great little handy digital pocket scale at Amazon for less than $10. It’s got great resolution and a nice display and it’s small enough to be pocketable. Some people will tell you to measure tea by the teaspoon, that’s useless. Measure tea and coffee by weight! You’ll be much happier.

Procedure:

To make a great cup of Tea (everything but Yerba Mate) – put your empty Finum basket on your scale, set it to grams and tare it to zero. Then sprinkle in enough tea to get to 5 grams. Take the basket off the scale and put in your Bodum cup. Get your water to 200 degrees (or 212, it’s not really that much of a problem for everything but white teas, they’re picky at 160–170 degrees) and pour the water into your Finum basket in the cup almost to the brim. After that, set your timer to 3 minutes (10 for Yerba Mate) and watch it closely. Tea, like Coffee can oversteep/overbrew and you get a nasty cup of turpentine for your troubles. I can’t express it enough, timing is EVERYTHING. More than temperature, more than the water, more than anything else. TIME. If you are brewing Oolong you will notice that the tea is full-leaf and expands like a sponge when you steep it, so what looked like little natty bits ends up being a basket full of full tea leaves. After the cup of tea has steeped for 3 minutes, pull the Finum out, let it drip out for a few moments and put on paper towel or it’s lid. Don’t throw away your steeped tea! Then set your timer to exactly 11 minutes 30 seconds and start it. During this time the tea will go from undrinkably hot to PERFECT. You can at any time add sweeteners if you like. Splenda, Nutrasweet, Sugar, Agave Nectar, Honey, Simple Syrup, or even Golden Syrup are all great sweeteners for tea. I’ve found that Agave gives the end tea an odd flavor overtone, so tread carefully. I like my tea very sweet, so I use two packets of Splenda. You can sweeten anytime you please. After you’ve enjoyed your tea you can put the Finum back in your cup, get your water hot again and re-steep. This is called Gong-Fu, and is a well-respected tradition in China. All teas can at least re-steep three times before they kind of fall on their ass. The only notable exception to this is Oolong. Oolong can resteep ten to twenty times and the further you go, the more subtle flavors end up in your cup. A little hint, after the first steep, which is always at 3 minutes, each subsequent steep you can add a minute, up to 5. So steep 1, 3 minutes. Steep 2, 4 minutes, Steep 3, 5 minutes, Steep 4, 5 minutes. You keep going with that pattern and you won’t go wrong. If you’ve exhausted your Finum’s contents of their goodness save the remains in a cup or bowl. You can throw these remains on Hydrangea, Roses, or Blueberry bushes and the remains will contribute plant-friendly acids to the soil. Never throw used tea or coffee in the trash if you can help it. The remains shouldn’t be landfill, not when they can make acid-loving plants thrive.

As for Coffee, put your empty, clean Finum basket on your scale, tare it to zero and sprinkle in 10 grams of ground coffee. A standard grind will be fine, you’ll get a little camp-coffee or grit at the bottom of your cup as the solids drop out of solution, but it’s not unpleasant. When I drink the cup of coffee to 25% full I like to swirl the remains around which picks up the sediment off the bottom and then I drink the remains. If you like coffee and don’t mind a wee touch of grit, it’s not bad. If you can swing it, a grind set for French Press will be even better and have less grit in the end. I don’t have a grinder and I don’t really want one. I’m fine with standard yokel coffee with standard yokel grind. Get your water to boiling. I would let it sit for about 10–20 seconds off the boil in order to get it down to 205–210 degrees. If you can get to-order 200 degree water, that’s ideal. Pour the water in the Finum in your cup just shy of the brim (most coffee will wetten and then start to bubble and float, bring that wet ground coffee almost up to the brim but do not try to agitate it to help it along, that will ruin your cup of coffee) and set your timer for 4 minutes exactly. You may catch what smells like burning coffee, whatever you do, don’t freak out. It’s not really burning. When the timer goes off, pull the Finum out and rest it on it’s lid. Set your timer for 11 minutes 30 seconds and then add whatever sweetener you like. I prefer, again, two packets of Splenda. You will notice that the final brew has an oil-slick on the surface and the rim of your cup will look filthy. That’s an unavoidable consequence of brewing the coffee directly without the paper filter. The paper filter strips out a LOT of really great tasting compounds. After you have brewed a cup of Coffee, you have to toss the contents, there is no Gong-Fu with Coffee. Once it’s done, it’s plant food. The only thing left after a brewing is tannins, acids, and the chemical nasty that you don’t ever want to drink. Plants love it, you’re all done with it. The really handy thing with preparing coffee this way is you need nothing more than what you already have for tea and the Finum is made of non-reactive stainless steel so you can brew for your entire life and there isn’t any crosstalk between tea or coffee assuming you clean the Finum out well. Another nice part is you only brew the coffee cup-by-cup. This way, you get the convenience of a Keurig machine without the expense and the wasted plastic cup. The only waste from the design I use is the grounds or exhausted leaves and those are plant food, so nothing is really wasted.

Anyone should be able to get started for less than $50 depending on your tastes. The kettle is $12 ish, the Finum is about $12, the scale is $10, and the glasses are $25. That comes out to $59. If you have your own cups or mugs, you can slash that down. If you have a kitchen scale you can slash it further. I like the handy little gram scale there because it’s easy to toss in my backpack for when I go to work. The durable parts are just that, they should last a very long time. The Finum, if you take care of it, should last forever. The scale will eat batteries and the kettle might be lost if you are really mean and rough with it. One thing to note about the kettle, and all kettles are that if you decide to go with tap water, you’ll eventually scale up your kettle and either have to clean it somehow, scrape it down somehow, or replace it. If you pass your water thru a Brita or Pur filter (or in the case of my workplace, a reverse-osmosis undersink filter) then you won’t ever have to worry about that.

For your investment, and of course the looseleaf teas from Chocolatea or the coffee from Deathwish, You’ll get to enjoy some of the best tasting hot beverages possible. There are so many blends at Chocolatea it’s dizzying. Plus you’ll be patronizing American businesses. Chocolatea is in Portage, Michigan and Deathwish is out of Saratoga Springs, New York. I find that I love tea made this way, and Coffee? I actually like drinking it this way more than percolated or brewed in an expensive coffeemaker. There is something special about brewing coffee like tea, it seems more direct and honest somehow. I know that there are a lot more flavors and essential oils in the coffee that I brew this way, where coffee that passes through a paper filter loses a lot of it’s subtler features. I could also swear that standard coffee loses some of it’s caffeine. The stuff I make seems to have more punch to it.

If you don’t find what you are looking for on the Chocolatea online store just let me know and I can get it myself and ship it to you personally. Of course that offer really is meant for family, but I could be bought for the right price. If you are reading this and you are in Southwest Michigan, you owe it to yourself to visit Chocolatea in Portage. Everything they do is excellent, they are fair, kind, and pleasant to do business with.

If you decide to follow any of this, I would love it if you would leave a comment letting other people know how you got along with these ideas. Did they work for you? If you try it and you don’t like it, the only thing you might not be able to use is the Finum, everything else can be pressed into service doing other things.

Good luck and enjoy the tea and coffee!

Sage Summit 2012

Posted on by
Reply

So here I sit at BNA, which is the airport in Nashville Tennessee. It’s just after a near week-long stint at a work conference here for our database vendor, Sage. The conference went very well and I got enough out of it to feel like I got my organizations moneys worth. There were high points and low points but looking back on the entire experience the good far outweighs the bad. The next time I have to do this will be when this event moves to Washington DC on July 21st 2013.

I haven’t blogged in a while and mostly it’s because the conference and socializing pretty much grabs you right after you wake up and won’t let you go until you drop in your shoes. I got to laughing that the only real moments of privacy I had was when I was in the bathroom, only because people won’t follow you into the john to talk – thank god for that! It actually became rather tragicomic. Each time I would get ready to start working with my email, or Instapaper, or well, anything else really there would be someone who would hail me and we’d start talking. Now, don’t get me wrong, I would far prefer to be interrupted and engage, after all, that’s what I’m here for, so this isn’t a complaint. This is more of an idle observation. The only time I wasn’t engaging with peers was when I was in the bathroom. So, in a way, the bathroom is the last frontier. 🙂

As I attended sessions and get-togethers the same themes kept on appearing with an unusual regularity. That people kept on referring to their IT staff as “them” and the sense of their feelings were that their IT really didn’t understand or appreciate their needs. I’ve written about this before, about what I do in my job and that I really have never understood how other people run their shops. It has been a concern of mine that whenever I introduce people to how I run my shop I get very similar responses. It’s shock, that an IT shop is open and receptive and welcoming enough to engage with their supported staff. In many ways I suspect that these other organizations have never read the “Good Book” when it comes to running an IT shop, which is “The Practice of System and Network Administration”. There is nothing I can do for these other organizations and I’m kind of pinned at Western. During the conference it struck me that I could very well start to write about some of the philosophies that I have developed in my little tiny niche. So in the spirit of that, I will be writing more about my job and the technical things that I do in the day-to-day operation of my job.

I often times sit back and wonder how many of my work peers read any of this drivel. Much of what I write will be dry-runs for some topics I plan on presenting during the next Sage Summit in Washington, DC.

So with Nashville functionally in my past, if not positionally, the blog posts coming up next will be more about my work. I wouldn’t blame anyone if they stopped reading for a while. It’s going to be dull. 🙂

Faith as an Idea

Posted on by
Reply

There are many paths to faith. Many possibilities and recently I’ve been musing on one particular idea of faith that amuses and appeals to me.

That the entire universe has only one soul in it, that soul is God. That through the function of the flow of time that singular soul is holographically projected throughout existence as consciousness in sentient life forms. Humanity for example.

As time flows, the light of life illuminates a structure fixed at the center of the nature of the Universe and shines through it. This structure we call God, and as the light of life shines through it, various expressions of that singular soul are played out throughout the expanse of the Universe. These holographic projections are all of us. That we are God, but more specifically, we are all fundamentally the same. Whenever one does violence to someone else, it is quite literally self-abuse. Not only do you do violence to yourself, but you do violence to God.

I consider this concept to be a riff on the Golden Rule, which is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” and lies at the very center of my ethical and moral existence. The lesson of the Golden Rule is that you should treat everyone equally, and nicely, the way you wish to be treated. In this light, the Golden Rule is recast anew as a way to honor God, by honoring ourselves.

This also eliminates the distance between God and Mankind. There is no distance between us, we are all one. Since there is no distance, there is no fear of punishment, how could God punish itself? This also answers the question of death. When time moves through us and wears out our bodies, the holographic projection which is what we consider our consciousness, the part of us that understands we exist, that does not simply evaporate, it continues on to be re-expressed as time moves forward and the light shines through our facet of God and we are born again.

The question of evil remains. Why is there evil in our world? Why do people do bad things? It is a curse of existence that we are so very ignorant. We just do not know, we can’t appreciate the finer aspects of this kind of faith. You can see the early formations of the Golden Rule accumulating in social animals that have yet to achieve sentience, such as our evolutionary fore-bearers, the primates. They demonstrate an understanding of the Golden Rule, so on some level, this faith is instinctual. Since it is not fully understood, there is fear. Fear is, to borrow from Albert Brooks, like a dark fog that settles on the mind. Fear blots out happiness, it clouds our thinking and leads us astray. The foundation of evil is then the natural progression starting at fear and progressing downwards towards anger and hate. There is evil in our world because we are ignorant of the Golden Rule or chose to not abide by it, and therefore we suffer for it.

Personally I find this a very compelling idea. This concept of faith, this possible structure to existence and helps define the murky concept of the flow of time. It combines the things we all experience, the understanding that time flows forward, the sense that a God could exist, and if it does, it’s formed by adding up all the very best in all of us, as well as birth, life, and death. It also defines a morality that has been with humanity longer than any other, that of The Golden Rule. The most interesting thing would be, what would happen if someone lived their life with this understanding and this morality? What would you do? What would your choices be? Would they be different than they are now?

Chick-fil-a

Posted on by
6

I wrote this as a Facebook comment, but I think it’s good enough to be elevated all the way to a blog post. I would welcome engagement on this subject, feel free to leave comments.

******

I actually have a vested interest in this entire kerfuffle surrounding Chick-Fil-a. The president of the company declared that they do not accept marriage equality for people like me. At first I only patronized Chick-fil-a because I was under the erroneous impression that their inequality towards people like me was rooted in their patriarch who was more than 80 years old and that his children would correct the company when he passed on. As it turns out, that is not the case.

At first Chick-Fil-a was guilty of basic inequality, a kind of mild bigotry. But over time more information was revealed about just how much Chick-fil-a hates people like me. They have donated money to organizations that have as their central purpose to deny marriage equality to LGBT individuals. There has also been some talk about how Chick-fil-a has donated money to support the Ugandan “Kill The Gays” bill, which supports the active murder and disposal of people like me. Driving past a restaurant that makes food where the management has demonstrated hatred and bigotry against me makes me upset.

The president of Chick-fil-a has stated erroneously that God, through the Bible, has decreed that people like me should not marry. He is unaware that his very church that he loves and believes in did indeed marry same-sex individuals from the beginning until 1250AD. Just because the church changed their tune does not mean God has. It would be more accurate for Dan Cathy to describe his position as “We chose to hate gay people and we chose to be bigoted.” Because that is what he has done. For 1250 years God, through his Church has sanctified relationships like mine. Just because you are ignorant of the history of your faith does not mean you are innocent of being a mean vicious bigot. It just means your ignorant.

In the end, what does it mean to not go to Chick-fil-a? It means that your money, or the instruments that hold value, even coupons for “free” food, which just shift the value from currency to your patronage, end up benefiting these people who have actively chosen to be ignorant bigots bent on demonstrating their hatred for their fellow man. They pose as Christians and I question this assertion. Jesus Christ, the man the Christians claim to follow had absolutely NOTHING AT ALL to say about people like me. His teachings were centered on love, forgiveness, and how one could eliminate suffering through following the path he taught. I am unable to successfully connect the actions of Chick-fil-a, a noted Christian company with the teachings of their Messiah, Jesus Christ. I do not see the love, I do not see the forgiveness, and I do not see any elimination of suffering. They uphold the banner of inequality and in the case of Uganda, state-sanctioned murder of people like me.

I am not like the rest of you. I am less of a person than the rest of you. I am not able to get married, despite being in a loving relationship for 15 years. I am beset by Christians who hate me despite their Messiah only preaching love. I am afraid for my life, I am afraid for my rights, and I am afraid that the inequality demonstrated to me means that those that treat this entire conversation so cavalierly do not really respect me or understand just how important equality is.

As I have said to many Christians before when they exhort that Jesus only wants to love me: I don’t want love. I want equality.

And I don’t want Chick-fil-a. I don’t want to support hate. I am sad that others do. But there is nothing I can do, there is nothing I will do, other than write these words. Do as ye will. Pray it doesn’t harm someone you love.

Ammunition online is cheap and available in bulk – Jul. 26, 2012

Posted on by
2

Ammunition online is cheap and available in bulk – Jul. 26, 2012.

After skimming this article a thought struck me. Nobody will ever really see the light of day when it comes to competent gun control in the United States because the Second Amendment is always held up like an adamantium shield deflecting nearly all legislation to keep guns out of the wrong peoples hands, the people who would commit crimes.

There is a way around this, however. The Second Amendment states that citizens have the right to bear arms, not the right to purchase ammunition. Some states, like Michigan have very strict controls on liquor sales, barring any liquor sales company from shipping to Michigan. Liquor is controlled by the state. Why don’t we apply the same controls to ammunition vendors? Only federally-vetted ammunition companies are allowed to sell ammunition, allow ammunition to only be purchased at registered gun shops and bar common carriers from being able to ship ammunition!

Yes, you can have your gun, you can have any gun you want. You can fill your house with guns, right up to the rafters – but the ammunition will be controlled. There is precedent – just as liquor is controlled, so can ammunition.

This shouldn’t upset the gun maniacs because they will likely have the equipment required to fill their own ammunition all by themselves, but they won’t be able to swiftly create 6000 rounds, they’ll have to work at it. And while we’re at it, lets put gunpowder under the same strict controls. So, carry a gun willy nilly wherever you go. The ammunition will be taxed to fund this new regulatory body and your precious Second Amendment will not be infringed. You have your arms, just not supplies.

The law states arms, not ammo. You can fondle your gun, you can even use it as a metal stick to strike someone else, but you’ll have to think long and hard when it comes to firing it when a box of 22 rifle rounds cost $150, or more. There is no reason why we can’t tax ammunition right out of existence. All that will be left are the people who press-their-own ammunition. And from my experience at doing this, if you fire that ammunition you best have very good equipment or one of those rounds may explode without releasing it’s bullet.

Solving the gun control problem, easy peasy.

One engineer's quest for the perfect pen | DVICE

Posted on by
Reply

One engineer’s quest for the perfect pen | DVICE.

Over time I myself embarked on a pursuit quite like the gentleman in this article. Looking for a pen that suited me because I wasn’t really finding a lot of usefulness in the market as it was.

I spent too long with pencils and their blurry, imprecise marks of graphite on paper that almost always faded over time until all you could note was the impressions the nib made on the paper after it was all faded away.

Mechanical pencils really didn’t help, except that they did do a rather good job in freeing me from manual sharpeners. The only time I took mechanical pencils seriously was when I took a drafting class in high school. I’ve dallied around with them at work, but they almost always end up going back to the coffee mug gulag where other writing implements go that aren’t good enough.

I then moved forward to ink pens, and here I wandered in vain for a very long time. Ball points, Gel Pens, lots of different technologies and they all shared the same awfulness. Eventually paper dust or age would clog their functional bits. These pens would suddenly skip, stop working, or after trying in vain to resurrect them they would eject their balls and void their ink all over the writing surface. I’ve never really enjoyed using modern cartridge ball point pens. I also tend to write quickly and these basic pens always leave me feeling cramped as my hand starts to resemble a claw more than anything else. Humorously, when I purchased my house I had to endure a flurry of paperwork and sign my name many times. At the end of the ordeal I actually couldn’t extend my cramped hand to shake on the purchase and so had no choice but to resort to using my left hand, which is like shaking hands with a dead bird. My left hand is nearly useless as my right hand does practically all the work. So, even these ballpoints were out. After some time I did some research on these devices and figured out that one of the chief reasons why I didn’t like them very much was that the ink really wasn’t so much ink as it was a kind of inky grease. The quality and feel of a pen as I write is more important to me, along with ink flow than anything else. As anyone knows, one of my dearest pet peeves is repeating myself. I hate repeating myself in speech and I detest repeating myself in writing. Ball points, grease pens, they all eventually fail me and force me to re-trace the same glyphs over and over again trying to deposit ink in the way that I need to in order to communicate.

As a rather humorous sidelight, I have for the most part abandoned this technology altogether for use of keyboards. In many ways I have even abandoned spoken word as I find it trying to get the right words out, especially when my poor male brain is agonizing over emotional processing and is just pushed that far enough where I can either hold on to an emotion or hold on to nouns, not both. There is something more even, more paced when it comes to writing that appeals to me, and as it turns out I’m more in touch with my emotions when I write than when I speak, it’s as if the paper provides me the mental room to explore my feelings as well as fish for the correct language to use to discuss them.

Which leads me to my own favorite pen, which runs counter to the pen described in the above link. My pen of choice, and frankly I have to admit that it is a very uniquely right-handed device is a Lamy cartridge fountain pen. It’s royal blue case and cap and ink cartridge are always with me. It shares space in my backpack with the other items I couldn’t go day-to-day without, such as my pocket watch, which I store while I’m at the gym so as to not injure it all wound up in belt and pants, as well as my gram-scale for measuring out my tea or coffee for my work life life-preserver. The way this pen writes, on any kind of paper is marvelous. The flow of ink along the feed to the nib means I don’t have to mash down and scribe the paper while I try to write along its surface and its unbroken ink means I don’t have to retrace what I tried to write, something that is worth more to me than any other feature.

Sometimes the best things are the old things. Just because modernity demands ball point, or gel pens and lauds their qualities doesn’t mean that modernity is correct. It’s been my experience that in this case, the very old design of the fountain pen, which hasn’t really changed in a thousand years from its first invention in 953 serves me delightfully to this very day. It’s funny that something so old, something that’s been with humanity for such a very long time endures. If you look out in the marketplace you won’t find these pens, I know, I’ve tried. I had to order this pen specially along with it’s ink cartridges. It wasn’t terribly expensive however this is not a pen you dispose of, this pen is something that stays with you for a very long time. It’s that function and durability that truly impress me. It won’t get clogged with paper dust, it’s not greasy, and the way it writes is beyond a pleasure. The only thing that I don’t do anymore is actually write letters with it, however now that it occurs to me, it’s something that would be a pleasure to do. Pursuing that is something that would send me off looking for the proper paper. My unusual eye would most likely be drawn by very fine paper in the A4 format. There is something delightfully rebellious and anachronistic about abandoning irrationally sized American papers for their more logical and pleasing metric counterparts. But that’s going to be another blog post, I think. 🙂

Out of Place

Posted on by
Reply

So when I walked into the local asian food market I definitely felt a sense of being a stranger in a strange land. I was clearly the tallest person in the market, as I walked around I realized that I couldn’t recognize a single thing on any of the packages. I was after ramen noodles and I didn’t think they would be too hard to find. After 15 minutes of wandering around the store I eventually did discover where the noodles were. What I found in the market that surprised me was that everything came in very strange sizes, initially it was all 11.3 ounces, so I originally thought that the issue was that they came in different metric values that made sense. After looking at the products I discovered that the metric values weren’t correct either, they were just very strange.

What added to my awkward feelings were that the market pleasantly requested that customers only purchase in cash. I did not have a problem with this, however I had to visit the bank first to get out $20, then make my purchase, then return to the bank and deposit cash. It wasn’t unpleasant as the bank was just around the corner from the market however it was a little funny.

As I drove off I realized that I could have just gone to Meijers markets instead and got what I was after all along. Now I don’t have any problem with patronizing the asian market however it would’ve been more convenient to visit Meijers and I could’ve saved the run around back and forth to the bank.

The next time I need a very special ingredient, of course I will go to the Asian food market for this purchase. For regular stuff I’ll just go to Meijers.

Special Note: This blog entry was 99% dictated using Apple’s newest OSX, Mountain Lion. I think it did a pretty good job. The only thing it didn’t get was special terms like “Meijers”.

Hopping on the Wagon

Posted on by
Reply

Comic Books. I was quite a fan of them before Mr. Johns sucker-punched me with the travesty of Brightest Day and then pushed me off the train completely with the New 52. That all being said, and in an effort to forgive some of that transgression I’ve decided to tentatively start buying comics again.

I’ve been not-reading for a very long while, despite it being very easy for me to start reading again since my Local Comic Book Store is actually in my basement, it’s all the comics that Scott has collected as he never fell off the wagon. No point in buying comics again!

Except, there is a reason to buy them again. And now we get to my three classes that I’m approaching comic books with. There are three, named, One, Two, and Three. What they mean has everything to do with how much I enjoy the books and my feelings on “rewarding” the comic book company with sales they wouldn’t have otherwise with my discretionary money.

Class Three – Comic Books I’m going to buy in digital format and catch up with. These books are my most favorite and I want to vote-with-sales the writers and artists attached to these books:

  1. Green Lantern
  2. Flash
  3. Nightwing
  4. Green Lantern: New Guardians
  5. Green Lantern Corps
  6. Red Hood and the Outlaws
  7. Teen Titans
  8. Atomic Robo

Class Two – Comic books that I want to read, but I don’t feel I want to pour money into. Since we already have these books on the premises I am going to read them. Is that theft? Reading another persons comic books? Technically I suppose if you wanted to be a huge anal dick about it you’d insist that selling a comic book has nothing to do with the paper and everything to do with the license to access the media and that license is expressly designed just for one person and not more than one person. So is reading a comic book I dig out of a white-box in my basement, theft? If so, all I really need to know is from the comic book companies, if this bothers you, please tell me and I will ignore these books below:

  1. Superboy
  2. Journey into Mystery
  3. Unwritten
  4. Wolverine and the X-Men
  5. AvX
  6. Extreme X-Men
  7. Blue Beetle
  8. Batman
  9. Detective Comics
  10. Batman and Robin
  11. Amazing Spider-Man
  12. X-Factor
  13. Avengers Academy
  14. Captain Marvel
  15. Ravagers

Class One – These are books I used to have but no longer want to read. Thankfully the ones on this list I haven’t bought in a long while and DC has actually come along and nailed them off for me. There aren’t any comics on this list.

Just in case people get really worked up about their favorite comic ending up on the Two list or the One list, know that if a comic really does well and touches me, that these are classes, not castes. I will always be open to pushing comics from One to Three or Two to Three. Just the same as comics from Three to Two or Three to One. Although it’s really quite something to ever leave Three, just so we are all on the same page.

Now it’s time for me to set up my order with Comixology. Still wishing they had a subscription model, but that’s an argument best left for another time.

First Look at Mountain Lion OSX for Macintosh

Posted on by
Reply

I purchased and downloaded the newest version of Macintosh OSX codenamed Mountain Lion. The download took a brief amount of time and once established I didn’t have a problem handling it. The first step was creating an independent system installer using a USB memory stick. I found some instructions that I remembered from when I did this with OSX Lion and the instructions worked well, up to a point. I was able to find the InstallESD.dmg file and I set up my 16GB memory stick with the proper format settings, specifically Mac HFS File System with Journaling and GUID partition map. The first issue I ran into was a strange memory error, that while restoring the dmg file to the USB memory stick, after the Mac was done really, in the verification step it failed with this odd arcane “cannot allocate memory” error. I went immediately to Google to look and found that if I mount the InstallESD.dmg file first, that *that* is the magic bullet. Turns out, it was.

Now that I have Mountain Lion on a USB memory stick I got a stock 24” iMac out of storage and set it up. Plugged the USB memory stick in, then the mouse and keyboard, main power, and while holding down the option key, turned it on. Everything worked as I expected it to! So far so good.

Once the system was up and running and in setup it prompted me to connect to a Wifi system, which was not a problem since I share Wifi from my primary work iMac (long story for another day) and it seemed satisfied. Then I ran into my first problem with Mountain Lion. During initial system setup I could not successfully log into any Apple ID. My personal one, or the one for work, either one didn’t work. The system allows you to continue without it and so that’s exactly what I did. Once I moved on to setting the time zone, this also failed, but I suspect it has everything to do with my shared Wifi coming from my Snow Leopard iMac and not something endemic to Mountain Lion. Instead of Mountain Lion successfully setting the time zone by it’s location I set it by hand. Not really a problem.

Once I got the system up and running, idle at the desktop everything was as it should be. My next step was to try to connect my test iMac up to my Apple ID. So logically I went first for System Preferences, then to Accounts, and there set my Apple ID. I was half hoping that setting it there would have had a chain reaction and set it everywhere else, but that didn’t happen. I noticed that iCloud wasn’t set up properly, so I found it in System Preferences, it wasn’t a problem, just a very weak annoyance. Then I tried the Mac App Store, had to do it again, same for iTunes. The only real irk that upset me was fiddling around with “Back To My Mac” feature which asked me to turn on sharing with a button that lead to the sharing panel. I was lost in there (no, not really, but I was in the headspace of an end-user) and it took me a while to notice that Apple did tell you where to go to set things up, so my one tweet about this being a problem is wrong, I was just hasty. I must say that much of this I will pin on me being in the “end user headspace” and not as an Admin, which I would have been much more careful and slow with in my approach to Mountain Lion. If you read and aren’t hasty, this isn’t a problem.

Every app that I’ve used worked well, some needed Java to be installed but the OS prompted to fetch it and install it for me without a problem so that was fine. Of the apps that work that I’ve tested, at least in that they open up are:

* Aqua Data Studio 11.0
* Dropbox
* iSquint
* KompoZer
* MarsEdit
* Miro Video Converter
* MPlayerX
* Music Manager (Google Cloud)
* OpenOffice.org
* Photo Wrangler 2.1
* Picasa (needed update)
* Postbox
* Seashore
* Spotify (needed update)
* The Unarchiver
* Transmission
* VLC
* What’s Keeping Me?
* XTabulator
* Zipeg

Of course, all the apps from the Mac App Store I assume work well. Dropbox was a non-issue, 1Password was smooth-as-glass, as I expected. But what really surprised me was Postbox. I recently fled Sparrow as an email client when they announced that Google was acquiring them. Postbox was my alternative. When I copied over Postbox and started it for the first time it offered to collect the settings form Mail.app which I didn’t think anything of and let it go ahead. Postbox seamlessly captured my iCloud email account and after I typed in my Apple ID password, I was up and running! For some strange reason, that really pleased me.

So, what is next? So far everything seems to test fine in Mountain Lion. There are some goobers from Lion that I still need to work out – such as secondary monitors in full screen mode being stupid, that sort of thing, and also to see if VirtualBox will work, but for the most part I’m satisfied that this new OS is exactly as Apple bills it, and they have done a very good job. There are some small irky bits and on my Twitter I’m sure it came across as being ranting-and-raving, but actually it’s quite good.

Next steps at work are tallying up all the people interested in Mountain Lion and figuring out how we’re to pay Apple for the licenses, then helping everyone set up Apple ID’s on their own. There is going to be a headache with all these new very independent and unmanaged Apple ID’s floating around in space, but if you want the Bright and Shiny you have to swallow a seed or two.

Answering War

Posted on by
Reply

Many things occur to me out of the blue when I least expect them to strike. It’s as if a part of me has been working on a problem, chewing on it, and when it reached a solution it gathers up all its paperwork and knocks on the front of my brain and says “Here, we’ve done all we can do, frontal lobe, here’s this for your consideration.” And I stand there in the middle of something really mundane and I’m stuck. I stop moving and much like when you open your door and find a brightly colored box with a bow on top, you spend all that time forgetting about what you were doing and stand in shock at the box. So it was with me earlier this evening.

Apparently a part of me was working on military strategy. Turns out part of the paperwork also included a method to cause a cease of conflict and effectively short-circuit a war, going from conflict, skipping over death, and moving to resolution. How you ask? I  was myself shocked at the answer and it comes from mother nature herself.

If you grow a very large amount of Cannabis Sativa, dry it out thoroughly and then set it on fire, then blow the resultant smoke out onto the battlefield, saturating every square inch with a thick white fog in about 15 minutes time all combatants will spontaneously stop giving a damn about whatever it is that they were fighting about and put down their weapons and sit down on the ground, some may lay down, others will likely lean back on their elbows. The key here is that every combatant will stop caring about killing and just want to “hang out” and “take in the majesty of this place, maaaaan” some may fall asleep and the rest will be overcome with feelings of euphoria, laziness, and extreme hunger.

Then, once you’ve smoked both sides until they have stopped fighting, you roll in hot dog carts, pizza carts, falafel carts, whatever. They go ding-ding-ing onto the battlefield and since everything is free (it’s war, this is what you pay for…) everyone is calm, feeling just fine thank-you-very-much, and the idea of getting a gun and killing someone else is about as far from anyones mind as humanly possible. You’ve just eaten five pounds of whatever and really all you want to do is take a nap.

Those that might be wearing gas masks will see the beatific joy and happiness on their fellow combatants faces and perhaps they’ll be encouraged to take off their masks. If not, then you still have to contend with an angry army, however if you continuously smoke them eventually any gas mask will saturate and stop working and people have to breathe. Over time, those that hold out with masks will just stop caring and get hungry like all the others.

This method would work perfectly for a peacekeeping force between two belligerent sides, so, for example, Americans versus Iranians – the United Nations peacekeepers cultivate millions of tons of dried cannabis sativa and start working on a smoker-gun and then we drop them into the middle of the battlefield and they just sit back with a beer in their hands, on a folding chair, making sure the machine chuffs out smoke nice and evenly. It doesn’t matter what your religion is, what you are fighting about, or anything. Once exposed to this smoke, nature will take its course. The course is not war, killing, or death – but rather just relaxing, taking in the sights, and wondering where the nearest falafel cart is.

I dare anyone to challenge this idea.