Dang’s Weblog

So, I’m a meat-eater from way back. Meat, preferably beef and in large chunks, is my favorite type of food. Just about everything I eat has meat in it. Even things like pasta usually have meat in them. Why is this? I have no idea, I just love the taste.

My favorite food is a good, thick steak, medium-rare. (Well, on the rarer side of medium-rare.) Mmmm. My mouth waters just thinking about it.

This brings us to vegitarian food. I almost always don’t like it. There are exceptions, but they invariably are strongly flavored. I don’t need strong flavors if I’m eating meat. For example, plain steak is great. With steak sauce is better, but just plain steak is better than most other foods.

So why is vegitarian food usually so bland? Don’t vegitarians like spicy food too? Cultures where much of the food is only vegitable based (such as Indian food) usually has strong flavors, why not in the US? Do vegitarians feel that they need to punish themselves for ever eating meat? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that most of America doesn’t know how to make vegitarian food.

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I love pine trees. I love the smell, I love the color, I love the way they form a canapy over the otherwise open woods. But mostly, I love the sound of the wind through them. I would love to have a cabin in the middle of a pine forest. It doesn’t have to be huge, just a single room (+ a bathroom), with a wood stove for heat, but it has to have a deck that I can sit on and listen to the wind. I’d love to make it myself. That would be perfect. Then, it could be my hideaway. Of course, I’d have to find some way of getting internet there, so I could listen to the wind and blog. Does that sort of ruin the image for you?

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So I went and saw Bulletproof Monk today, and it’s a fairly standards complient martial arts movie. There’s the great master, being pursued by evil villians (this time Nazis), and guarding infinite power. All the classic martial arts features, including impossible abilities. Good clean family fun.

I love martial arts movies, and especially that subclass known as Kung Fu movies. For one thing, I love the fighting. Well coreographed Kung Fu is just beautiful to watch, even if it’s movie fighting and not real. I looks remarkably close, except for the impossible stunts, of course. For another thing, they have the same kind of “Good vs. Evil” that westerns have. While I’m a fan of grey, there’s a certain amount of charm in black and white, especially since martial arts movies, at least eastern ones, tend to define Good and Evil as Us and Them. Black and white without the moral baggage. It’s refreshing. But mostly, I love the epic fights, in a way that no other genre or movie has. I’m sorry, but a firefight using guns just isn’t the same as a good martial arts battle. There’s something of this in sword fights, like in The Princess Bride, but it’s doesn’t have the grace of martial arts.

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First person shooters are wonderful therapy. Just heat on up, grap your favorite weapon, and kill some bad guys. It’s great. All the fun of real violence, none of the consequences or guilt. Of course, the ones where you’re killing non-humans aren’t as good as the ones where you’re killing humans. Aferall, interdimensional alien beasts and demons from the hell plains don’t manage to piss me off very often, while Joe Blow cutting me off in traffic is a constant annoyance. It’s much easier to transfer my anger onto human opponants in video games than non-human. Bang! Splat! Instant tension release.

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Well, it’s easter again on Sunday. Seems like it kinda just crept up on me this year. Maybe it’s because I didn’t get dragged to any church-like events at all this year. No Good-Friday-Not-Mass ™, no setting up the basketball court to become a church (which they aren’t doing anyway since they have a real church building now), no easter vigil, no hitting people with palms. I didn’t even know it was palm sunday last week, excep that some guy was explaining to his limo driver at the airport why he was carrying a palm frond. No giving up of television. We didn’t turn off the electricity yesterday, like my parents do. No meatless fridays.

Frankly, I didn’t miss any of it. Good riddance.

This year, the only thing we have to do for easter is go open easter baskets, and go to the seder at my parent’s house. Now that’s a good meal, in spite of the prayers.

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So, there’s this soup place in the mall here, called Soup’s On. I really like the place, especially the Chicken Chili, which I get every tuesday. With your soup, you get a roll, with a choice of bread types. I always get sourdough, because that’s my favorite type of bread. Today, they tell me they’re considering changing bread companies, and the new one does not have sourdough. Apparently, my new choices will be french, onion-something, or multigrain. Now, french bread is really blah. The only use for french bread, as far as I’m concerned, is to bake garlic and butter onto it to make garlic bread. This onion-something is probably okay, but likely won’t go very well with my chili. And multigrain it just no good. So, what do I do about bread? I suspect I’ll just get whatever and not eat it. That’s just too bad, because I love to dip my bread in my chili. Maybe I can convince them to give me a bread bowl instead, they might have sourdough bread bowls.

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I finally got my LVM rooted system to boot. Turns out I had ramdisk compiled as a module, rather than compiled in, so initrd wasn’t working. Phew! That’s a relief. Now maybe I can move forward with my root-in-tmpfs for my workstation at home, that would allow me to spin down all the disks, and save a ton of noise. I’d also like to put LVM root on my laptop, so I can resize partitions if necessary. That would be cool. Hopefully, I can even do it without reloading my linux, but you never know.

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In the past couple of days, there’s been a whole slew of news on Tivoesque devices. Just today, ReplayTV was bought. This doesn’t really affect me, but is interesting none the less, because ReplayTV does something I wish my Tivo did. About a week ago, Tivo announced the Home Meda Option, which does some of what I want, but only works with Windows. Then, there was an artical yesterday about creating your own PVR, with Freevo. This is what I want to do, but it involves a non-trivial amount of work and a non-trivial amount of hardware I don’t have. However, it’s becoming a problem, as we had to delete a lot of stuff we were “saving” in order to make sure that there was space for the things recorded while we were in New Mexico. If we could just back up the files off-Tivo, even if we couldn’t watch them off-Tivo, that would be enough, but currently the only way to backup Tivo programs is to VCR, and we don’t even have a VCR in our stack anymore. Maybe this will get me off my ass to actually make my PVR, I don’t know.

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I’m feeling a bit burned out right now, and I have no idea why. Maybe it’s having to write documentation all day for two days in a row, maybe it’s something else. It’s hard to tell. But right now, I just kinda want to sit and do nothing. Maybe I’ll manage to convince myself to program or game or something.

On a side note, I can’t get my LVM-rooted Linux to boot it’s bloody initrd. It’s annoying. It keeps saying that it cannot mount the root. Maybe tomorrow.

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I really hate Word. Okay, in this case, it’s not even Word, it’s OpenOffice Writer, but as far as I’m concerned, they’re the same. Writer has the one huge advantage: that I can use it without rebooting into the (non-existant) Windows partition. But, for what I do, the interface and user experience is exactly the same, with a few color differences. Gods, I wish I had a decent editor. But what can you do? The boss says “Word format”, so I have to work in Word. And it blows. Blows, blows, blows, blows, blows. At least in college, when I only had to hand in printed format, I could use LaTeX, and write in a decent editor…

Sorry for the rant, but I was about to go nuts.

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