Idiomatic Expression

Thanks to Chris and James my base URL has changed to the slightly more conveniant randy.amber.org. I think I have updated MovableType correctly, but let me know if you encounter any problems accessing the archives or pictures.

-The Mgmt.

Democratic presidential hopeful, and former Governor of Vermont, Howard Dean has a blog. Unfortunately he isn’t the author of the blog, it is written by people with trendy names like Aziz Poonawalla and Anna Private. Still pretty cool that this trend (fad?) may help a presidential campaign.

So far I like what I have seen of Howard Dean, MD. It will be interesting to see if he can get enough support to beat out the Democratic Bush-clones for the nomination.

Oddly enough in a marketing frenzy not seen since Spaceballs the movie, Howard Dean the Tile Box, Howard Dean the Toddler Button up Hoodie, and Howard Dean the Beer Stein are all available here. I guess a guy without any big name sponsers has to get is funding from somewhere.

I haven’t posted anything to the website lately because for the last 5 days every waking minute has been spent at work or shoveling snow. The estimate for Fairfax County was 18 inches. Apparently my yard is a snow magnet, because I swear that my yard had between four and eight feet of snow. My aching legs, arms, and back will back me up on that as well.

I cooked Katherine dinner for St. Valentine’s day and going out on a limb I tried three new recipes gnocchi, pesto sauce and chocolate fondue. I included the recipies for the interested, they are based off of directions I found on foodtv.com. It was nice to have a chance to cook something, and I played around with all of the recipes a bit.

The gnocchi recipe called for baking the potatoes for about an hour which gave me plenty of time to prepare the pesto sauce. Peeling the potatoes while they are still hot is a bit of a challenge, but a clean towel to hold the potato while peeling is helpful. I rolled my gnocchi logs a little to thick, around an inch thick, so I had to extend the cook time a bit.

Surprisingly both the gnocchi and the pesto sauce turned out pretty well.

After watching a weeks worth of chocolate manufacturer propaganda on foodTV, I decided to splurge on good chocolate. I found a box of Scharffen Berger 99% cacao unsweetened baking chocolate at Whole Foods Market, and it does taste better, much much better.

For once everything turned out wondefully the first time so we did not have to resort to plan b (ordering pizza).

I had a couple of free minutes last night so I designed a new background based on the red vase pictures in the Random Pictures from October - November 2002 picture archive. It turned out pretty well so I decided to share it just in case anyone else was bored and wanted to play around with the picture.

Fullsize JPG ~200KB

If anyone really wants the PSD (~2MB), contact me and I will get it to you.

In a move that is sure to delight druggies everywhere, New images from the hubble telecope have been released. In other news the pictures are really really cool!

I finally got around to posting the pictures from our vacation to Cancun.

Katherine and I took our first vacation together in the first half of December 2001. If you dislike drunken frat-clones this is the perfect time to visit Cancun. Cheap flights and super cheap 5-star accommodations at the Hotel Baccara were the other reasons for choosing Cancun for our first vacation.

So I made my semi-annual visit to the dentist today and I had my first adult cavity. Damn it! I had been having a slight pain in tooth 19 when I ate extra crunchy foods and it hit my tooth in just the right (wrong?) way. So before my cleaning I mentioned this to my dentist, he poked at the tooth and said that he didn’t see any really problems other than a small crack. He informed me that 80% of the time a little sealant would stop the pain, I agreed to that and he hit the tooth with a drill to open up the crack.

DAMN THAT HURT!

Once he opened up the crack he found a pocket of caries. So I got the big scary shot of novocain and numbed up while my teeth were being polished.

Why does it smell like burning? Oh that’s me! After 1.5mm of drilling all of the caries has been removed, and the dentist alternates squirting small amounts of liquid on my tooth and shining a light into my mouth.

So now I have my first adult filling, it is composite filling so I shouldn’t be able to see it.

As long as nothing hurts when the novocain wears off I will be happy.

Many of us have fond memories of wasting parts of their youth on dial-up bbs systems. Jason Scott is obsessed with it. I heard Jason speak about a year ago at Rubicon and the scope of his planned project is insane. He wants to document everything even remotely associated with the text based BBS in a documentary. The website www.bbsdocumentary.com has more information than you really need to know about dial-up BBSes. Including a comprehensive list of BBS software.

My only complaint is that there is really no mention of rise of the text-based Internet BBS. I know that at least a couple of you wasted more of their college life than I did on ISCABBS. ISCABBS is the BBS of the Iowa Student Computer Association whose website seems to have no real content.

The best part of his posted research is the BBS timeline hosted at the associated site textfiles.com. You know you want to find out why the timeline starts in 1876!

Configuring X on the Dell C600 can be a pain in the ass so I am sharing my config file in case anyone else can benefit from it.

Thanks to monkey.org and this guy.

Dell C600 XF86Config