Author Archives: bluedepth

Old Chicago

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Who knew that the local Old Chicago restaurant in Portage was such a cruisy place? A few days ago Scott and I stopped in for lunch, for a change of pace from our usual trip to Culvers and after being seated and ordering one of the staff members, who might have been a manager, comes up to our table and asks me if I work out at the Anytime Fitness in Kalamazoo.

I look confused and then I confirm that I do work out at the Anytime Fitness in Kalamazoo, as opposed to the older one in Portage. He mentioned that he’s seen me in there several times and that he wanted to welcome me to his establishment.

It was all very above board and very pleasant, however I couldn’t shake the idea that I was being cruised. Thankfully my self-monitor was fully engaged so I didn’t allow the interaction to grow or become anything more than just a pleasant bit of restaurant flattery amongst the flatware.

After the fellow left, I commented on how unusual it was to Scott and he didn’t see the cruisy bit but thought it was a great customer relationship trick, to go out of your way to mention that the proprietor has seen you beyond the confines of their establishment and how it creates a sense of community and recognition. If nothing else, such flattery is very likely to lead to repeat patronage and I have to say that I do enjoy going to that restaurant. Scott then teased me about joining the World Beer Tour game they host there and that I’d flirt with the fellow that flattered me.

There just isn’t any winning. 🙂

Stop Fear, Stop Hate

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http://t.co/DRY1lzF9

This is what comes of blind obedience to religious dogma. Your children are GAY and your children are DYING!

We will never know who they might be. They might have cured cancer. Now nobody will know.

Your faith in the Bible is killing your children. They just want love and instead all they get is hate. Hate that kills.

Stop talking about Jesus Christ. He would have never accepted one child to die by THEIR OWN HANDS! If you love Jesus so very much then love your gay children and leave Leviticus to the JEWS!

It is time for an end. An end of hate, an end of suicide. You do not understand. GOD CREATED US GAY FOR HIS DESIGN! You are destroying children. There is no penance earnest enough to relieve the shame of a needless death.

So, if you hate gays then FIND ONE and hug him or her. See that we are not evil. We are your children, your friends, your loved ones. What do you think your GOD would say to you, upon meeting him or her? Would he or she congratulate you on your defending a book written by 2000 year old men with sexual maturity problems, or would your GOD weep at your bigotry, your hate, your baseless ignorance of the truth of your children’s lives. Well?

It is self-evident. Dead children are WRONG. WIll you all just wake up and get over your fears and grab your gay child and tell them that you love them permanently. Would you etch it in stone and carry that stone on your soul for the rest of your life? Your children are DYING and THEY DON’T HAVE TO!

Grow up and stop making God cry.

DCUO

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Yesterday Scott talked me into downloading DC Universe Online and joining up as a “Free to Play” player. I cleaned up my old Dell gaming PC as DCUO is a PC-only game and loaded it onto my computer at home. The client and all the content clocks in at over 20GB so it took a while to download across the network.

Once I got the game installed I had to fix DirectX, and then after that it ran. I had seen it during Sony’s beta test of the game and wasn’t terribly impressed or thrilled with the gameplay mostly because the human interface was so different from what I was used to with City of Heroes from NCSoft. I knew Scott was very keen on having me play so I relented and agreed to play the game. While going through the lead-in trial course that every new player has to go through I revisited the same issues I had before when playing the game. The mouse and keyboard controls are maddening. I was cussing and swearing while trying to button-mash. It felt like the inanity of a Playstation game, where you dispense with the pleasantries of the cut-scenes and the lame lead in until you move a figure to a part of the screen and then click like you’ve got Parkinson’s.

Near the end of playing yesterday, around lunchtime I went exploring the settings of the game and discovered to my chagrin a setting called “Invert Camera” and that singular adjustment made the game MAKE SENSE TO ME. All of a sudden the game played much more like City of Heroes and once I was beyond that obnoxious hurdle I actually really got into playing the game.

What do I think of DCUO? It’s certainly a competent game and is engaging. The mission system is acceptable and the play itself is entertaining and worth my time. The only real issue that remains with DCUO is how much lag the mouse pointer has when it’s not controlling the camera in-game. You have to have patience with the pointer as it doesn’t fly as your mouse moves, it instead feels like the game is asking the computer to manually redraw the mouse each time the mouse updates. This is irritating but not so much to make me stop playing the game.

As I play more of DCUO I’ll have more experience and will most likely refine my critique of the game and if I have the presence of mind enough I may blog about it again in the future. Or I won’t. We’ll see.

So Rude!

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Today at our local Meijer’s Market I witnessed something that set my teeth on edge and nearly had me speaking out. We were going down the cookie and cracker aisle and I witnessed a mother of two little girls pull up in a cart to where the wafer cookies were, the mother grabbed a cellophane-wrapped Meijer-brand version of the cookies, tore the wrapper off and handed the cookies to her puling children.

This isn’t the first time I’ve witnessed such behavior in Michigan. I’ve never in my life witnessed it in New York and I don’t know if it did happen there and I was just not cognizant enough to notice or if this is indeed a Michigan quirk. People have absolutely no qualms about grabbing a product off the shelf at the supermarket, opening it, and before they have checked out and paid for it, they begin to consume the product! I find this a very rude behavior and it drives me to distraction. You didn’t pay for it, at least not yet, so what gives you the right to just chaw into something? Can’t you wait until you leave the market before you feel the urge to shovel matter into your gaping maw? It doesn’t help that some of these people make that disgusting crunch-munch-gasp-goopy wet sound that comes with people who masticate in public. That alone drives me crazy! Please, for the love of god, either learn how to eat with decorum or eat somewhere else! Anyways, I witnessed this and I instantly thought that that mother was perpetuating two very bad things. First, that you can open a container in a supermarket and just go to town on it without paying for it and second, that her children will grow up spoiled rotten on instant gratification. They put their little prissy hands on their hips and screech and carry on and someone hands them a pack of wafer cookies to shut them up. It ruins the children and sets a bad precedent for normal behavior at the supermarket.

I don’t know if anyone else has witnessed this atrocious behavior where they are. I find it abhorrent and repellent. I can’t stand loud masticators and I really can’t stand such rudeness. Perhaps it has more to do with the idea that I don’t prefer to think of my fellow man as a rude lout with absolutely no manners at all – despite the notion that not everyone can have the same sense of decorum that I was raised with. I think what bothers me is that my sense of decorum shouldn’t be remarkably strict, it should be common!

I didn’t approach the mother and chide her for her bad parenting. I can attribute that to MY sense of decorum. At least one of us has it. Filthy rude loutish proles. Gah!

Let There Be Light!

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What a busy day! I racked up some serious accomplishment tokens today, just around the house. We’ve had two lights and an electrical socket that have stopped working. The socket sizzled and popped sending chunks of old bakelite and ceramic out into the computer alcove on the second floor of my house. The lights, oh god, the lights. The wall light on the wall of the alcove has been broken for about a year and a half. The hallway light on the ground level has been dead for about two months now.

The socket was just old. I turned off the house power at the mains because I don’t trust that this house I live in was built with any kind of zone-idea when it came to the electrical distribution network here. So instead of risking my life to fix this outlet I just turned the entire house off at the service entrance. I undid the outlet and of course this is the one outlet where they snipped the wires good and short. Any pull out? None whatsoever. On the positive side the house is wired with solid copper wiring, on the negative side, the house is wired with solid copper wiring! That stuff is very stiff and once I got the old outlet out of there (some cussing and swearing) I tried to apply the new outlet and of course the posts for the wires would not stay in an up position, so I had to use a pair of scissors and a screwdriver and a needle-nose plier working with absolutely no give to the wires whatsoever. I did this at sundown of course because I’m a glutton for suffering. Scott held the flashlight and offered moral support while I went on a blue streak against the bright bulbs who built this house. Who the hell trims the wiring to fit exactly in the service box and not give any slack?!? This place does! Gah! I wished very very unpleasant things on the wire-monkey who put the upstairs wiring together. I was finally successful in getting the new outlet installed and I tested it several times and there aren’t any shorts, both plugs in the outlet work fine and that was a solid win on Saturday.

The next deal was our regular going-to-Lowes and fighting over lights. There is something about the lighting department at Lowes. It doesn’t matter which Lowes, they are all the same. When we walk in it’s like we’re both possessed by jilted lovers bent on mutual annihilation. The minute we leave the lighting department everything is fine. It’s a lot like the scene in Transylvania 6-5000 when Doctor Frankenstein goes in and out of his lab, the personality shift is that profound for us both. We needed to replace the light in the hallway on the ground level. Those that have visited us, this light is between the kitchen, bathroom, and two ground floor bedrooms. The bulb was fine, but the fixture was shot. It was my top bet that it was in the fixture because there is no reason for the switch to go bad suddenly and there isn’t any way that wires in walls can have a failure unless they’ve been nibbled on by rodents. We don’t have rodents. So, while we were at Lowes, in the lighting department, wishing we could drown each other with giant sacks of sledgehammers we came across this very neat fixture. It’s a wall-mount fixture with a oiled-copper base (that’s the color name at least) a clear glass bowl and an old style Edison lightbulb featured in the center. These bulbs really are quite awesome. They have multiple filaments and their bodies are clear so you can see the light the glowing filaments make. The bulb is designed to run at 60 watts and only give off 350 lumens of light. It’s dimmer than a standard incandescent bulb and the light is warm and very yellow. To me it’s exceptionally romantic and is a far more appealing choice than standard CFL bulbs which either put out a bluish light or a really white light. The yellow light throws off the color of the hallway, but I really like the look of it and if someone really doesn’t like it, swapping it out for a CFL while they are visiting us is not a problem. Taking down the old fixture was not a problem, the distribution box in the wall was circa 1945 and finding the right screws to fit that was a challenge. The new fixture came with a bracket, and I saw how to assemble it together. I got the old fixture out, cleaned the distribution box as best as I could and installed the bracket, routing the hot and neutral leads through the center hole in the bracket and found the right screws to attach the bracket to the distribution box. An electrician would of course have suffered a full Raiders-Of-The-Lost-Ark facemelt if they were to witness me doing the installation but I can say the damn thing works. Once I got the primary fixture up, the rest of it went very easily. In went the test CFL bulb and that worked fine so I opened up the Edison bulb and it was big and fat and beautiful. I screwed the bulb into the base (it uses a standard bulb base too) and turned it on. The six parallel filaments are glowing and I can see them from here. They throw off a very 19th Century glow.

The upstairs fixture is another matter altogether. Nobody makes fixtures like that anymore. Everyone makes vertical wall fixtures that attach to distribution boxes and in-the-wall wiring. The fixture upstairs eschews all of that for a simple fixture hung with a nail in the wall and an electrical wire running down the wall and plugging into the outlet directly below. This fixture hasn’t worked for years and I’ve been searching in vain for a new one. Several days ago it struck me that something so simple couldn’t be permanently attached and likely could be serviced. So on a previous trip to Lowes I went to the lighting department on my own and found a replacement lamp base with a brass pullchain. I bought the new base and took it home with some replacement incandescent bulbs as this fixtures shade actually attaches right to the bulb itself making CFL’s useless in that application. I grabbed the fixture, and immediately saw how the old base was attached, I pulled it apart, unscrewed the leads and put the new base on, put it all together and tested it and it worked like new! So now when you walk upstairs and turn to the computer alcove you aren’t stumbling around in the dark searching in vain for my desk lamp, the light on the wall is right there and usually will be left on when people are in the house.

Altogether I have to say I’m very pleased with my relatively low-brow DIY accomplishments. New fixtures bring a bit of freshness to this place and repairing the other fixture really pleased me as I no longer have to search in vain for a replacement fixture any longer.

Hooray for tiny accomplishments!

Splints

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I was in England and was exploring an old house with friends (didn’t recognize them) and came across a series of rooms that were exact copies of our childhood homes. Everything was perfect right down to the sinks and mirrors.

I met myself as my “splint” walked through the door to the rooms that were from my past. He was an exact copy of me. I had my iPhone and was taking pictures. I asked him about being a splint and if he knew why he, or the place he inhabited existed. He didn’t know but wasn’t upset and seemed to enjoy my presence and felt that my questions were entertaining or at least worth attending to. I was exploring my childhood bathroom, taking pictures and I turned to him and asked him if he had anyone in his life. He blushed and I had to ask if he was serious with someone and for some odd reason I was really interested in TMI derails. As he was about to tell me I was fumbling with my phone, trying to get it to take a video and as he was about to share with me intimate details the dream dissolved and I woke up.

Awful Books

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Reading the Steve Jobs biography is primarily a monumental headache. I’m filled with regret for buying that book. Every time I open it up I get angry. Great blazes of rage and all I want to do is throw it away, I want to stop reading it. But I can’t. It’s my curse that once I start a book I have to finish it, even if I’d rather pound my band into a bloody pulp with a sledgehammer instead of open it one more time.

It’s uniquely an awful book. It is the first and last time I’m going to read anything written by Isaacson. I need a quiet place where I can suffer through this awfulness. The only thing I really wish was that it was a paper book and not an ebook that way I could throw it in the backyard, douse it with gasoline and let the hateful thing burn.

I really have to renew my library card and get to borrowing this dreck. At least that way when these awful books manifest I can get rid of them without having to waste precious money on this printed crap.

Can you hear me now?

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It all comes down to trusting the infrastructure. When you can’t trust the infrastructure anymore then it feels as though you are standing in an hourglass and the sand is running out beneath your feet.

This is how I felt after embarrassing myself towards a vendor by the name of eSpatial. I was asked by a coworker to investigate this vendor for geolocating alumni at work. I started their 14 day free trial and uploaded some data, nothing I thought that was too onerous, 250,000 US Postal Addresses. After some back and forth I learned that the trial account only can accept 10,000 addresses, but nowhere was that stated in the trial offer, that there was a limit. On January 12th I sent a link to an eSpatial rep so that they could create a demo account for me and show me what their company could do.

I waited until January 20th and then I wrote an email. I told them that I didn’t like being left in the dark for eight days when it should take them at most an afternoon to load my data and show me what their software could do. Then I got back an email telling me that they tried to email me and tried to call me to no avail. This is when I discovered that the infrastructure at work really isn’t working out for me. Apparently the messages just didn’t arrive. I checked all throughout “Webmail Plus” to no avail and I even checked the “PureMessage” spam system and the messages weren’t in there either. It’s as if the email wasn’t even delivered. Then the fellow from eSpatial told me that he tried to call me and the call never got through. I suspect that my setting my work phone to failover to my cell phone may be to blame on that one. I would put money behind the notion that international incoming calls will not be forwarded by the switches at Western to another line, instead they will simply be dropped. I have my phone set up that way because I absolutely detest voicemail and so I want incoming calls that are inbound to WMU to ring there first and then move on and ring my iPhone. There is a solution for that bit as well, and it involves turning my back on my work phone as well.

So how do I correct this? I can’t trust my work email any longer – I’m losing messages and making a fool of myself. I can’t live with doubt that the infrastructure works, and get anything done, so I have to compensate. The best way to compensate is to leave WMU behind when it comes to this infrastructure. My work phone number is now meaningless. My work email account is now meaningless. So everyone should strike those from their records and use a different number from now on, because I cannot trust that the infrastructure provided by my employer works properly.

I have to turn to Google at this point to provide the infrastructure that I need to do my work properly. Ironic if anyone has known me over the past few years that I’m turning to Google for infrastructure, after all, it was my crazy-eyed ranting that implored my workplace to use Google for their infrastructure but fell on deaf ears. So I’ll do it myself. The accounts and phone numbers will still be technically valid and reachable, but I’d rather people not use them. Instead, please use these instead:

Phone: 269-216-4597

Email: andymchugh75@gmail.com

If you have my personal gmail account, feel free to use that, as I trust gmail.com with my email, but no others.

I hate doubt and I will not accept it in my life.

Healthy Chicken Parm

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Today was an exercise in trying to convert a time-honored recipe into a healthy alternative. The dish was Chicken Parm. We all figured that the pasta and sauce was pretty much a fixed requirement so we worked on what could be done with the chicken itself.

Instead of frying the cutlets in breaking and egg, we all pretty much agreed that we should bake the chicken with spices and then when it’s done, give it a little cheese covering. While at the market I found 2% Italian blend shredded cheese which helped cut back on the fat and the calories.

On the whole I thought it came out very well. I would on reflection have cooked the chicken longer or hotter than I did. It was done, but not done where I wanted it. It was good to eat, but just a smidgen rubbery for my tastes.

As a side I rolled up some Pillsbury Croissant Rolls and dressed them in a butter and garlic salt wash before baking. They came out crispy and with just a hint of garlic. The only real leftovers we had were about 3 cups of pasta, but those are easy to put up as leftovers for someone’s lunch tomorrow.

Today we also visited Cody Kresta winery in Mattawan, MI. Every time we go we come away with wine. They have a real passion for wine making and it comes through their bottles. I love their 2010 Chardonnay, it’s got a wonderful note on the palate that I just love. They are only 20 minutes away and so it’s not any real chore to go visit them. The lady who manages the tasting studio there is incredibly pleasant and she sells her wine very well.