Terry Poulin

Takikomi Gohan

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Experiments in the kitchen of late have generally revolved around Japanese food and techniques, specifically applications for dashi broth and miso paste.

Tonight’s dinner plan was pretty much a take on takikomi gohan, based on wondering what rice cooked in dashi would taste like. Honestly, I can say that there is only one problem with this entire concept—it smells awesome while the rice is cooking!

Like really, not only was the food delicious and uncomplicated to make…but it felt like driving with delicious food riding shotgun,you know where it smells so good that it’s almost a form of torture having to wait for it 😂.

Yes, I think it’s safe to say that the experiment was yummy 😋

The simple pleasures of coffee

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Today, I decided on a pleasure I haven’t been partaking of lately: freshly ground coffee. For the last few months, I’ve mainly ran the pour over with pre-ground coffee. One of the things I like about my Chemex, is I can actually use regular ol’ ground coffee out of the store and still get decent results. Grinding is optional, unlike my French press.

This morning on the other hand: beans, grinder, and the sweet, sweet joy of fresh coffee. Also, a Peruvian blend that I’ve never tried before 😀.

I personally find it calming to grind and brew coffee, but I also find that I so rarely do since swapping from the French press to the pour over as my main brewing method. The key reason that I swapped over was the convenience of the pour-over’s filters, it’s a lot easier than making sure none of the grounds go down the drain. Clean up is a breeze. Yet, ironically I also consider cleaning the coffee grinder part of the personal therapy of making coffee. It’s just a darn inconvenient part, when you really want some coffee in the morning, lol.

Well, that makes me feel better

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Today, I decided on a little test that’s been on the back burner for a while. See, being on the shorter side, my slacks don’t really go with my shoes as well as they do my boots. It’s also a bother to roll up the pants legs and keep them from unrolling if I’m out for a while. Meanwhile my house shorts aren’t suitable for my typical on-the-go load, thus the experiment: belted cargo shorts. The perfect combo for comfy shoes and still having the usual stuff in my pockets.

As I was getting dressed and putting my socks on, a thought occurred to me. Women can be quite attractive in knee length socks and a skirt. My hairy legs with shorts and boot length socks on the other hand, I imagine would make someone cringe as not the Zettai Ryōiki that they desire to see 😅. Being more of a boots and trousers type, I haven’t really worn shorts as outside wear since circa high school, but it’s an efficient solution for times where I want to where my shoes rather than gear up in boots just for a quick errand.

To the woman at Publix who complicated my Vibram Furoshikis, thanks, you really made my day a little brighter!

Resident Evil Village – 1980s Live-Action Movie

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On one hand, I pretty much decided to watch this clip because, “I’m damn tired of seeing this as I scroll by.” That really summarizes how I feel about most of the AI generated yada-yada that pops up whenever I visit YouTube.

On the other hand, it both kind of makes me wish that someone would make a good horror movie adaptation of Resident Evil Village, and makes me want to play the game again….

While I can’t say that RE7 really did it for me, so much as I was glad for more of a return to the game’s roots, I really did enjoy Village. Discounting remakes, Village was probably the best resident evil game since RE4.

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Reading “BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn’t,” I’m quite sure I’ve known a few sticks that meet this description.

I still remember the pain and suffering that was the performance of USB sticks, back when I had to do some installation framework goodness for an embedded system. The whole live bootable stick was taking about 2 1/2 hours to load per test, so eventually I reached for the pair of USB sticks I was carrying at the time. One of those $10 sticks reduced the I/O wait time down to about 35 minutes, making for a much faster development cycle; so much so that production bought a bundle of those for use in the lab.

And then there was that other $10 stick, which I never realized was so drastically slower than the first. That sucker was so damn slow that it was “Free to good home USB stick, just don’t bring it back!” and of course, I met that stick more than a few times over the years.

Ya know, I should’ve just used the soldiering iron 🔥

MGS Delta: Snake Eater

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At last, the date is announced!

Pretty much, if they can pull off Not Screwing Up, I’m likely to be happy. MGS 3: Snake Eater was one of the most influential games of my teenaged years, and much of its aging owes to the dated controls and limited video output modes of a PlayStation 2. Knowing about Delta, is the main reason I haven’t been playing the recent PC release of the original, that and wanting to dig into the first MGS.

Please, Konami, don’t screw this up 🙂

Dino Crisis

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One of those cases of “Remember to check that out” is the news that Dino Crisis and its first sequel are on GOG. As a kid, I was never really that great at Resident Evil. It didn’t really help that the initial U.S. release kinda had borked aiming until the director’s cut and dual shock versions. I was also more of a dinosaurs kid than a zombie fan.

Needless to say, Dino Crisis was probably my next big take on the then-young survival horror genre. One that I actually played quite a bit of and would revisit as a teenager. Compared to the original Resident Evil trilogy, I found Dino Crisis much less stressful and unnerving, and far more curious and mysterious.

Part of me wonders if the plot and setting have held up, or if I’ll just be disappointed. Part of me also wonders if this time, maybe I’ll finish the darn game. :^o

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Not sure what’s worse, how many of these (most)I’ve seen or that one of them is a movie I’ve been trying to figure out for years.

I’m pretty sure that Dark Angel (1990), also known as I Come In Peace, is a movie that I watched as a kid a few years later around ‘92 or so. One that a few scenes stuck with me in visual memory but frankly, I’ve never seen or heard of it again—until now, over 30 years later.

Between the disc based weapon, the alien dude, and the vial I’m certain as I can be that it’s the film I vaguely remember watching when I was like 4 or 5, short of finding a streamable version somewhere.

Some of the other films noted in the above video, is saw when they were relatively new; either on television or rental. Others in the 2000s, or in more recent years thanks to video streaming services.

But I’ll mostly admit to watching this video because the cover image made me wonder if it might give me a clue about Dark Angel. Mystery solved, I think.

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Reading “I was skeptical about Snapdragon laptops. A work trip made me a believer” from my news feeds, I couldn’t help but snicker at the actual story content.

See, the first time I had the joys of three planes to reach a destination, I was rocking an Asus EeePC 1015-series that I principally kept in text mode and low key to be able to write on. It didn’t even last the first flight never mind the entire 12 to 14 hour trip. All it literally had to do was run vi to be sufficient for my purposes.

The next time I ended up on such a trip, I was rocking an Eee Pad Transformer TF101 and found it to be a world of difference. Instead of a dead battery on the first flight, I literally had enough power left to fall asleep to Netflix in my hotel room before I even reached for my charger.

In the years since, Intel has managed to “Not suck” on power efficiency but only in relative terms in my experience. It’s not crazy to get a decent work day out of an Intel powered laptop, provided you are not pushing it too hard. But once you ramp up the workload the battery life tanks accordingly as measured in hours away from an outlet. By contrast, my first ARM powered tablet never blinked unless I was compiling code in a chroot for 8 hours straight, on a system that wasn’t meant to work that hard in the first place.

I kinda look at the notion of Windows on ARM with hopefulness, because frankly I think it’s about damn time. What helped PCs take over the computer world is the insane compatibility that IBM and Microsoft compatible machines afforded. Almost all of the Windows 95/XP targeting games in /dev/closet just work on modern machines, despite Intel PCs having changed drastically in every sense. Hell, I still have machines that will boot MS-DOS digital eons after both it and floppy diskette ceased to be relevant.

Compatibility is the best reason to avoid different CPU architectures, especially for ‘brainless’ perspectives. But we passed the point where native code was the only option: Apple’s Motorola to PowerPC migration and the original Java virtual machine proved that well enough in the wild. That was several decades ago, and performance has improved all over. Today, my M2 MacBook Air can literally run video games in Rosetta 2 well enough that I wouldn’t know they weren’t native \o/.

One of the things people often forget though, is that Microsoft originally did something really clever back in the 1990s. Windows NT was designed with multiple architectures in mind. In practice, the MIPS and DEC Alpha support didn’t mean much since almost everyone would be using a 386 with a load of memory, or soon would be dominated by x86 one way or another. But NT hedged many bets.

Personally, I have no real love left for Intel despite being an Intel brat most of my PC life. ARM in my experience, better delivers what I tend to want in a battery-powered machine but that tends to be different than what I want in a desktop PC. Likewise, having dealt with more than a bit of shouting, “Damn it, Intel!” back when I was an embedded monkey, I have even less love professionally than personally. Even more so the further you go from purely CPU and into their other pieces of the puzzle.

They had a good run, but I say hasta la vista, Intel.