Tag Archives: salt

Accessing the Big Bag O’ Tangents

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At work I got to talking about the climate and climate change. About how all the weird weather is just going to get worse and how stupid all of it is. From Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth that nobody much cared for because they just don’t like Al Gore is where a lot of the foolishness starts. I started to riff on a theme after that, noticing on the way that a lot of rich people seem to cluster around the water’s edge. I got to laughing as I considered what a pretty good rise in sea level would do. Say goodbye to New Yack, buh-bye Florida, and then there was this: “Oh yes, we have a house in the Hamptons… we’re so filthy rich and ohh-la-la.” … “We had a house in the Hamptons, but that’s all under the sea now.” I shifted gears and thought about a anthropomorphized mother nature beating the tar out of Florida. I don’t really care much for Florida, they have citrus, rain, oppressive heat, and really adorable under-the-sea-level-but-still-dry land contours. What happens when the sea rises? Florida will be covered with sea water. It’s going to be very hard to grow any citrus after an anthropomorphized mother nature is finished SALTING THE EARTH, after all, seawater is saltwater! Anyhow, I eventually returned to climate change and got to talking about how methane is a much worse gas than carbon dioxide when it comes to the greenhouse effect and that got me talking about how American stockyard animals all fart and release Methane.

Then I remembered the little bit of trivia that marsupials don’t host the bacteria that convert sugars into methane so animals like Kangaroo just don’t fart. Kangaroo Obviously I wasn’t done, and I needed to end it on a humorous note and I pulled down some points in the column of ‘obnoxious and obscene’ and posited that we should switch out cows, pigs, and chickens for their marsupial counterparts, like kangaroos and such and that would be better for the environment. It didn’t actually stop there, I got to thinking about how one dispatches chickens – you decapitate them and then them run about until they exsanguinate and stop moving, then you pick up the dead and dress it and you’re all set. Naturally I thought about what one could do in my fictional America where we’ve switched out to Kangaroos. What if you decapitated a Kangaroo and let it bound about? Kangaroos are big, lots of blood and energy and without a brain they’d probably take off bouncing along. Here’s the good part, imagine a new reality TV series where people bet online to see which Kangaroo, once properly beheaded gets as far as it can bounding off without a brain. Make it a national lottery, pack it with ads, boy, that would be a huge moneymaker.

There will be a full moon in two days. So, you know, that’s my excuse for all of this. People who know me shouldn’t even bat an eye at any of this. 🙂

Superpass Password Hasher

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Superpass Password Hasher.

This site has a rather novel approach to dealing with passwords. I see this a lot in both my personal and professional life, especially when people lose their computers. The question looms ‘Did you… ?” and usually the answers aren’t very good at least from a security standpoint.

One of the biggest things that people can-and-should do is keep individual passwords for every single site they access. Most people could approach this via tools like my beloved 1Password but this may be another approach that might also work. It uses an encryption staple called a hash to generate a multi-character password based on some simple password, a salt (which is used to increase the randomness that is added to the encryption routine) and the domain you are working with. It’s quite elegant in that it offsets the need to store individual passwords because it, supposedly, relies on stable domain names to provide password reproducibility. Each time you enter your simple password, and the domain name hasn’t changed, you should get the same hash over and over again. I still think that 1Password is still the best choice for everyone, but this might be a good starting place especially if cash is tight and you can’t swing a 1Password license.

UPDATE: After trying this out I discovered that it only really works well on plain sites like Google.com. If you go to any other sites, like Apple or nytimes.com the code breaks down on Safari. I couldn’t get it to even work on Firefox 13 on the Mac, so perhaps this isn’t as robust as I had hoped. The idea is still good, however. For what it’s worth.

Kalamazoo Beer Exchange

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Last night, December 21st, 2010 we got together with our friends and headed to a new restaurant on Water Street in downtown Kalamazoo. This old building was District 211 first, a restaurant that served really odd food at really high prices, then it became Charlie Fosters, which was a smoky Chicago faux-mobster dive and that too failed. In its current incarnation it’s Kalamazoo Beer Exchange.

This new restaurant has a very nice interior and thanks to the statewide smoking ban actually is pleasant to enter. The wait staff really aren’t that interested in welcoming new diners to the restaurant, one may think that they are simply overworked, but we noticed them chatting and ignoring a build-up of new diners at the front door, so take that for what it’s worth. Once we were seated we got our menus, which were fine. This establishment serves bar-food and bistropub food, an odd high-brow/low-brow mix which is cute and innocuous. When you sit down the focus of the bar area is the market-ticker display, a giant flat panel television with the prices of every carried draft beer, and they have about 30 of them available. We asked for a menu of their beer provisions and they didn’t have a menu for their drafts. So you pretty much just had the brand and the name to go by. The gimmick is not readily apparent at first glance and it took a verification question to our waitress to figure out what it all meant. Draft beer prices are adjusted every 15 minutes by the popularity of the beer. So if Bud Light sells a LOT, the price goes up. If beers don’t sell well at all, the price drops. So each 15 minute cycle you could pay $4.25 for a 22-ounce glass of beer, or $3.25 a bit later. The gimmick is cute and does set them apart, but it eventually does lead to irritation as the popularity-feedback-loop means that value is pretty much out the window – a beer isn’t expensive because it’s good beer, a beer is expensive because townies make it one way or another. Case in point, Bud Light was 4.25 and Labatts was 3.25. Ohhh-kay.

As for the food, that was the biggest heartbreak for this place. The burger was top-notch, really well done. The soup was okay, I could have taken or left it either way, but the one thing that blew my mind and ruined the entire experience was the value-added french fries. That’s right, you have to pay an extra dollar to get fries instead of potato chips. So I was forewarned that the fries were overseasoned before and that perhaps they had corrected the problem. Well, obviously not. The dollar-more fries were HORRIBLE. Overseasoned was the weakest description possible for what was slung on a plate. The salt level was beyond anything that I had previously experienced. If I was responsible for perpetrating those french fries and charging money for it, I would be living in a constant fear of being lynched.

That being said, our first experience was a massively bad one. The gimmick is worth a chuckle at first but eventually gets very old very quickly. The food suffers from those unforgivable abominations they call French Fries, and the cost, $32 for 2 people is too high for what you get. We won’t ever return to this restaurant and it’s one of many downtown that we regard as never-agains. It ranks up there with Food Dance in over-expensive pretension trying to masquerade as anything but bottom-of-the-barrel dining. If the initial experience doesn’t drive you off, then either gastroenteritis or kidney failure will.

Garlic Bread…

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Making your own food and not buying it pre-made often times works out for the best. You save money, you control every aspect of the food and you can avoid many of the chemicals in commercial food processing. To which I have discovered my new favorite Garlic Bread Recipe:

  1. Buy a day-old Vienna loaf, price cut in half because it’s not fresh. You don’t need fresh, not for this.
  2. 1 stick of unsalted (or salted, who the !@#$ cares) warmed in the microwave until it is mashable with a fork, not melted into a bubbling buttery moat.
  3. 2 to 3 heaping tablespoons of minced garlic. I bought my garlic in a pre-minced form, it’s a giant 32oz jar. It’ll last me a little while. People who don’t like Garlic often times don’t like me because I absolutely LOVE Garlic.
  4. A few shakes of Garlic Salt on top of the butter-stick-garlic-pile.
  5. Mash with a fork until you make a paste.
  6. Cut the bread loaf in half, then that half longitudinally. Spread the butter mixture onto each side and put in the oven at 400 degrees until it pleases you.
  7. Cut and serve. Watch as you identify every Vampire in the city, they’ll know what you’ve made and they will flee.

This dish isn’t heart healthy, really, but life is so short anyways – to deny yourself the pleasure of what amounts to being a carbohydrate and fat Garlic Bomb is reprehensible. You aren’t meant to have a long life, just a full one.

Om Nom !@#$ NOM. 🙂