Category Archives: Lite

Side Effects: May make your head explode

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LiveJournal 6/17/2003 –

In the annals of history mankind has searched for drugs that answer to our shortcomings and inadequacies – now we have PT-141, a replacement for Viagra that is an inhalable spray through the nose that generates similar effects to Viagra except, to quote: “They also found the drug seemed to help patients overcome performance anxiety because, unlike Viagra, it works with or without visual or tactile stimulation.” 

So, lets hear it for the smart barkeep who has misting equipment set up on the dance floor and loads it all up with a solution of 10 parts water to 1 part PT-141. America will never be the same. 🙂

HINDSIGHT: Drug causes a huge spike in blood pressure, alas, you’re randy but your head explodes. Awww! 🙂

Who's Hungry?

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LiveJournal 3/30/2003 –

Man alive is it chilly out there! I just got back from doing something I haven’t done in a long, long time – went down to the park and fed the ducks. However there bears a correction in that I wasn’t absolutely surrounded by just ducks but rather some geese and a cadre of very bedraggled squirrels who weren’t sure I was actually feeding them or throwing dirt at them, dumb squirrels. So I went down to the edge of the parks pond/lake and immediately when I rustled the plastic Meijer bag it was like someone rang the dinner bell, I was approached very cautiously by ducks, geese, and perhaps a gosling – I couldn’t be sure. The law of supply and demand at work was fascinating to see, drop a entire slice of bread in the water and immediately female ducks paddle over, quacking the whole time, taking nips from the males and even challenging the geese – these are some ballsy ladies. I of course as a human had to throw the entire shebang off it’s balance point by flooding the “market” with supply, even the most sickly looking male got at least a nibble. I was down to half of what I came with and I walked over to this very short concrete pier and I heard this chittering sound, turn, look down, see one very audacious squirrel just sitting on his haunches staring up at me with his hands out – it was so endearing! I put my hand in the bag and the little squirrel started to move off nervously until I brought out a huge chunk of whole-wheat hamburger bun, I tossed the entire bun right in front of the squirrel and he made this happy little squealing noise, grabbed the bun which was nearly as big as the squirrel and started munching away. I left with nearly half of what I came with and decided to save the rest for some warmer day when I can gather a bigger group of avian guests. There is this wonderful feeling from knowing that one single act, tossing stale worthless bread to the wildlife, could possibly keep a few of them alive and that it was a vastly superior thing than simply tossing the bread in the trash to rot.

Meyers-Briggs Personality Inventory

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LiveJournal 3/23/2003 –

Your Type is
ESFJ
Extroverted Sensing Feeling Judging
Strength of the preferences %
1 11 44 44

Description of the ESFJ:

Guardians of birthdays, holidays and celebrations, ESFJs are generous entertainers. They enjoy and joyfully observe traditions and are liberal in giving, especially where custom prescribes.

All else being equal, ESFJs enjoy being in charge. They see problems clearly and delegate easily, work hard and play with zest. ESFJs, as do most SJs, bear strong allegiance to rights of seniority. They willingly provide service (which embodies life’s meaning) and expect the same from others.

ESFJs are easily wounded. And when wounded, their emotions will not be contained. They by nature “wear their hearts on their sleeves,” often exuding warmth and bonhomie, but not infrequently boiling over with the vexation of their souls. Some ESFJs channel these vibrant emotions into moving dramatic performances on stage and screen.

Strong, contradictory forces consume the ESFJ. Their sense of right and wrong wrestles with an overwhelming rescuing, ‘mothering’ drive. This sometimes results in swift, immediate action taken upon a transgressor, followed by stern reprimand; ultimately, however, the prodigal is wrested from the gallows of their folly, just as the noose tightens and all hope is lost, by the very executioner!

An ESFJ at odds with self is a remarkable sight. When a decision must be made, especially one involving the risk of conflict (abhorrent to ESFJs), there ensues an in-house wrestling match between the aforementioned black-and-white Values and the Nemesis of Discord. The contender pits self against self, once firmly deciding with the Right, then switching to Prudence to forestall hostilities, countered by unswerving Values, ad exhaustium, winner take all.

As caretakers, ESFJs sense danger all around–germs within, the elements without, unscrupulous malefactors, insidious character flaws. The world is a dangerous place, not to be trusted. Not that the ESFJ is paranoid; ‘hyper-vigilant’ would be more precise. And thus they serve excellently as protectors, outstanding in fields such as medical care and elementary education.

Rosewar Chronicle

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LiveJournal 3/1/2003 –

I broke down and did it. I printed out the website for the Rosewar Chronicle, the Changeling Game that Scott is running and that will be playing later today. I’ve started with a highlighter and the NPC list and I’m carefully marking down key bits for my character to know and now I can put faces and names to what they did. However it does feel very much like an Agatha Christie novel, I keep on expecting a Trod to open up and Poirot to jump out with the stock phrase “I know the culprit!”. Of course that will never happen, Scott doesn’t make it *that* easy. I think that maybe this time if I know who is who and what everyone is referring to by being able to read it all up while we play I can be more “into” the game. I suppose all my years of regarding D&D players as unsociable pale number freaks will have to erode away – there is just some limits to how “into” the game I can get.

A movie quote has been bouncing around my head these past few weeks:

“Life is suffering your highness, anyone who says differently is selling something.” – The Princess Bride.

Anyhow, moving along, Ryan has to sleep and I can certainly understand, I’m the walking dead myself. Tomorrow will be great fun, here’s to early game starts and not passing out. Maybe I can wrest control of the entire party and exercise my early game playing will on them all. Hah, my character leading… terrifying.

Fey

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LiveJournal – 3/21/1999

I find myself before the front door of my best friends house, Mark. I knock on the door and he answers – walking out into the driveway before his door. We begin to talk of old times as we start to walk out to his car. What I remember to be a simple Buick form is replaced by a terribly helter-skelter chopjob vehicle with disparate parts all welded together and unpainted except for patches of blue around the top of the garish vehicle. I look back towards Mark’s house and the ground is covered in ghostly afterimages of champagne glasses occupying each square foot of the ground around my feet. [SCENE SHIFT]

Standing beside a large dark rock I recognized off into the distance what at first appeared to be simple fireflies. These fireflies got larger as they approached and stopped appearing anything like regular fireflies. The warm diffuse of peach flavored light surrounded their heads and rolled about, from the inside to the outside carrying small flecks of silver and blue dots in the peach fuzz that surrounded their personages. Spotting me and my companion they started towards us cautiously until my companion started after them. They immediately flew apart like a murder of crows to an oncoming hiker. Filtering into the surrounding woodlands I watched as they flitted about – with such dexterity and speed as I’ve never experienced before. I explained to my companion that these were most likely Sidhe fairies and that we’ve crossed one of their trods by mistake. At hearing my voice the fey came coursing out of the woodland and surrounded me. My companion leads us to a church where under the guise of contacting someone else, he contacts the authorities. He tells us all what he has done minutes before the authorities arrive to the church. I stare at the Fey surrounding me and most appear to be very small and very young looking children, some look to be quite aged – but only so in the eyes. If you gaze into their eyes you can almost make out on the periphery of your field of vision their true natures, making out the deep lines that mark their very old faces. However by simple gaze or even a glance they appear to have the cast of a child surrounding them. I explain to my companion that these creatures have been around since Prime and that they serve no ill purpose whatsoever. I admonish my companion with talk of human curiosity and the raping of discovery that will most definitely occur when the authorities apprehend the Fey we have corralled. The authorities are almost upon us as I look to the strange congregation before me and explain to them in friendly terms how they have to approach this situation and outlast it. I tell them that they have to apply a bit of glam to their personages in order to generate an even heartbeat, for Fey do not have hearts. They nod and smile, each face an innocent reminder of childhood in both myself and my companion. My companion now is starting to shed tears for his mistake at calling the authorities. The peach colored halo that surrounds their heads flickers stronger for brief moments with rivers of silver and blue running like liquid electricity around this peach torus that surrounds them. When the authorities open the door the halos evaporate.

Grow Lights

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LiveJournal 2/13/2003

What I remember from last nights dreams don’t add up to much at all. I was back in Buffalo wandering across a grassy field in front of fraternity row. I had tickets in my hands to watch some kind of field sport played between two teams and the “gist” of the game was “the fighting eagles”. I turned to the first open field I saw and I saw people playing a field game, and asked someone at random who was playing and their response was “the buzzing mosquitos”, then the scene went all wobbly and I could see a whole series of fields going up like a ladder, each one expressing some type of larger conflict. I’m not too sure what was at the end, wether it was indeed the eagles or the flying wooly mammoths. After that dream I slipped into another one in a hardware store, where everything was covered in a fine dust and the clerk behind the checkout counter was so old and stationary as to be covered in the same layer of dust, all that was moving was his big white eyebrows, as if he was dreaming. I asked him if he had any grow-lights for plants and he beamed, ran into the back room behind the counter and came out with a dozen boxes all containing a grow-litebulb for plants. He commented that nobody wants them anymore and he starts to scrape off the old pricetags, $90.95 the stickers say. He puts them all in a bag and hands them to me like it is some kind of gift, then I pop awake right after that.

Power Outage

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LiveJournal from 4/25/2002

It’s a sunny april day and I’ve decided to take today off sick, primarily because I haven’t been sleeping well as of late and secondarily because today looks to be so great outside and I think I deserve the little break. 
Last night a monstrous cold front moved through the area very quickly which brought with it some massive winds, up in the range of 40mph and up. Evidently these winds were strong enough that when I went to go pick up Scott at work last night at 11:45pm I found myself driving down Westnedge Avenue on a city block that had no power running into it. It was such a surreal experience that I felt compelled to write about it today here in the journal. It was a strange feeling, driving into a zone of darkness left the impression of nothing new but rather the new feeling of something absent. It was ephemeral, like something just oozing out the side of consciousness, the feeling was fleeting and spry but if you tried to ignore it it would dash back in front of you and play around. All of the buildings looked so terribly strange, as if by extinguishing all the light they became the true empty shells that they really were. This lead me to the idea that all the attendant lights, the floodlamps, the little nightlights and the perpetual glow from fluorescent tubes all created this kind of fuzzy zone of intended purpose, that these buildings could spring back to life at the flick of a switch. Instead what I saw and felt was rather a nagging impression that these buildings would never be lit again, or at least they never would be lit in the same way as before now that I saw them robbed of their background personalities and exposed for what they are, cinderblock loneliness covered in plastic and asphalt.

That's not where you thought it was…

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Earlier this evening, after dinner, we went to see if Scotts newest find was still open. They closed at 9pm, so that was a little blah. As we were driving away I noticed that right next door was “Partners Ultra-Lounge” and I stopped the car and just gaped. I, for the past year or so thought erroneously that Partners was in =downtown Kalamazoo= not in PORTAGE! As I was gaping it hit me… This apparent “destination” that I now realize that I’ve never really known is part of a strip mall. A gay bar in a strip mall. I’ll just let that sink in.

I’m still quite a-gog about this. What a shock! Still have zero interest in exploring anything more about it, but surprised it was in Portage. Oh well… 🙂

Power Outages are always fun

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Last night we had a rather hefty batch of thunderstorms move through the area. One of the strikes tossed our local power distribution grid for a loop and every computer was off this morning. This is always a really interesting time to find out what fails. It’s during these events that devices, computers, network gear, you name it take a hit on the chin. Maybe they’ll be fine, maybe it’ll be a total KO.

So far we’ve got the “Garden Level” out of network capacity altogether, the third floor has spotty connectivity and when I pulled into work my phone was ringing that people on the second floor were having problems accessing their files located on one of my servers. That wasn’t it though! Of course not.

My computer was off, when I turned it on my Apple Trackpad was unreachable via Bluetooth. Tearing the device out of the bluetooth settings and rebooting then re-pairing fixed that, and we’ve had instances of that happening throughout our office for people using the trackpads.

It’s a lot like the USS Enterprise when she’s hit by a torpedo. It’s always Engineering that is picking up the pieces, dealing with leaks, or exploding. Sometimes I feel a little bit like Scotty, “It’ll take 3 weeks to fix, but I can have it done in 2 hours” or Chief O’Brien “That’s broken? AGAIN? I JUST FIXED THAT!”

At least it keeps us employed and occupied. We won’t go into how these strong storms and odd weather patterns are cause for concern… p’shaw. 🙂

Pushing Om Nom Nom to 11

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Quite possibly the best recipe I have that is insanely delicious and not very bad for you is Alton Brown’s Dan Dan Noodles. Here’s the recipe:

Dan Dan Noodles – Recipe courtesy Alton Brown, 2011

Prep Time: 30 min Inactive Prep Time: 0 Cook Time:1 min
Level: Easy
Serves: 4 servings
Ingredients
1/3 cup creamy peanut butter
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger
2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
1 tablespoon dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 tablespoon Chinese black vinegar
1 tablespoon chili oil
1/4 cup low-sodium chicken broth
8 ounces ramen noodles
1/2 cup roasted peanuts, chopped
3 scallions, finely chopped
Directions
Place the peanut butter, garlic, ginger, soy sauce,
brown sugar, sesame oil, black vinegar, and chili oil into the bowl of a mini-food processor. Process until
the mixture is well combined and forms a paste, 1 to 2 minutes. With the processor running, gradually add the
chicken broth and process until the sauce is creamy and well combined, 1 to 2 minutes. Transfer to a large
mixing bowl, cover, and set aside while you prepare the rest of the dish.
Place 4 quarts water into a large pot and bring to a boil over high heat. Add the noodles and cook until al
dente, 1 to 1 1/2 minutes. Drain thoroughly in a colander. Add the noodles to the bowl with the sauce and toss
to combine. Serve topped with the peanuts and scallions.
Copyright 2011 Television Food Network G.P., All Rights Reserved
Printed from FoodNetwork.com on Sun May 08 2011© 2011 Television Food Network, G.P. All Rights Reserved