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After being busy between the lab at work and my mother’s steady pestering, I miss having time to update my journal – what a wonderful thing weekends are!

A photographic decision

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While brushing my teeth tonight, I have come to a decision about how to limit the ways my mother can pain  me. When I came back from vacation, my mother took great effort to see my photo album distributed however she pleases. That was generally met with forcing people to go straight through me if they want to see anything of mine, which is obvious if you want to see my stuff. Well, due to my mother’s unresolveble nastiness and her constantly using that as a form of leverage to attack me through, I have decided the following:

From this date forward, anyone who is currently related to me by blood or marriage is blocked from viewing any photo’s that I have taken in the past, currently have stored, or will ever take in the future, except where posted publicly. Likewise any violations by future generations shall be met with aggressive sanctions to match. In plain English that means, I have just banned my kin from ever seeing a single solitary photo that I ever take or have ever taken.

To match this decision, any web albums of mine currently shared with “Family” have since had that access permanently revoked. Any kin contacting me will accordingly be linked here in the future and any currently open loops will be e-mailed linkage to this decision. If need be this sanction will be expanded past the scope of kinship.

My mother has proven nasty enough to me over the past ~23.5 years that I choose to close this case in this manor, rather than allow her any way of attacking me in the future. I also have no concern what so ever just how unkind or inconvenient this decision may prove for kin that deserve my kindness—because being nice to you in about this, is not worth the cost my mother adds to it. So don’t bother crying if you feel this is harsh or unfair. It’s the price we all share for being related to my mother.

Decision is final for the length of my life or my mother’s life, whichever lasts longest.

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Yesterday was a nice bit of fun. On top of not so good dreams, I end up *sailing* home at 60mph when it is practically raining fleshpounds outside—and I do mean sailing! All because my mother is wigging out over the weather report. By the time I’m nearly there, and there is barely a freaking drizzle in Duluth, compared to John’s Creek, she texts me saying the tornado was cancled. Poppycock! Then to top it off, while I’m working from home, she pesters me enough that I quit work early to take her fucking shopping to shut her the fuck up. And guess what? While I’m unloading the car there is such a flash monsoon that my feet and one eye was all that was left dry, guess the boots worked. Literally it was worse than showering with your clothes on. Of course, it was over by the time I was done, leaving me drenched. 

My vote is still she wanted to go shopping ASAP. Pest.

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When working off a local clone of code while I’m stuck sitting in a doctors office, I’ve got to admit, it would have been smart to have run make tags, and copied the resulting TAGS file over from the development environment to my transformer. Turns out it depends on more than just the usual tags generator >_<.

Oh well, I guess it’s time to nav it the other way!

Project Butterball

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No, I am not making a turky (hell no!) but I did just try a bit of pound cake. I started with this recipe as a base and the knowledge that the traditional pound cake is a 1:1:1:1 ratio of eggs, flour, surgar, and butter. This is my first cake ever, and more of a quest to figure it out than create a yumo confection.

My end result for test Alpha:

  • 1 cup unsifted cake flour.
    • sifting in a colander proved nuts, so I just attacked in a measuring cup.
  • 1/2 cup sugar.
  • 1.5 stick of room temp’ butter.
  • 3 eggs
    • I only failed at the first egg, and lost most of the yolk.
    • Being smarter than totally stupid, I used two containers: one to hold the eggs and one to crack/drain in.
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1.5 teaspoon pure vanilla extract, since both my other half, my mother, and Google all agreed.
    • My first go is more about science than taste!
  • 1.5 sticks of butter
    • seems excessive to me but as Paula Deen says, “Butter makes it better”, so I digress.
    • I chopped it for ease of mixing.
    • My mother suggested melting it.
  • 3 tablespoons of milk
First I washed the pan, containers, tools, etc; let the butter, eggs, and milk sit out. Then I started to measure stuff out into containers. Got my eggs together and put the milk in, mixed them up with a rubber spatula and cut the butter into slices and greased the pan with some. Then while mixing for a bit between, added each the flour, sugar, some butter (maybe 2/3 of 1/4 a stick). Than I put in the extract and more butter, mashed and mixed that and set about getting in all the butter.
After a while of doing this with the rubber spatula and a old whisk, I saw it would take forever to get the chunks out of the batter, so I just switched to a hand mixer: first at low, than for a bit at speed and throttled back to low to finish it off. Poured it in the pan, switched on the oven to 350′ F and let the batter sit in the pan for a couple minutes while I made prep to clean; then I stuck it in and cleaned up after myself. In retrospect I should have taken a picture of the batter, as a gauge for next time.
Here is how it came out:
It came out soft and tasty, not overpowering and rather close to what I wanted really. Next experiment I think, will trade some butter for vegetable oil.
Of course, the moron^H^H^H^H^Hgeek has to have a test tasting :-).

Sometimes Linus is a genius

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When you begin to do more advanced things with subversion (not my idea, trust me), I would have to conclude using tarballs and larger hard drives is more useful than subversion.

For the first 10 years of kernel maintenance, we literally used tarballs and patches, which is a much superior source control management system than CVS is, but I did end up using CVS for 7 years at a commercial company [Transmeta[11]] and I hate it with a passion. When I say I hate CVS with a passion, I have to also say that if there are any SVN (Subversion) users in the audience, you might want to leave. Because my hatred of CVS has meant that I see Subversion as being the most pointless project ever started. The slogan of Subversion for a while was “CVS done right”, or something like that, and if you start with that kind of slogan, there’s nowhere you can go. There is no way to do CVS right.[12]

source: Wikipedia on Git.

Please, for the love of sanity (and science), do not use Subversion…..you have been warned!

Reflections on the ICS / TF Prime craze

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In the time frame of like July/August I was rather interested in Android 4.0: Ice Cream Sandwich, as well as the ASUS Transformer TF101 that I’m writing this on :-). During the time since though, I am kind of sick of hearing about ICS. However I will admit that I am glad to be proven wrong by some froathy mouthed visitors to xda-developers, that the TF101 ASUS did decide the TF101 will get ICS. 

In the lead up to the ASUS Transformer Prime being announced, the forum section for the TF101 has to many people geared up to swap their TF101’s out for TFP’s, that you can’t help but remember: it is a techno-geeks paradise! That being said, if I have to hear much more about the Prime, I will frakking smack someone lol. 

When I got my TF101, I had the option of waiting a little while for the Prime or getting the current TF101, and obviously chose the original Transformer. Why? It’s got good enough hardware (arguably better than what I need), and it is better debugged. The platform is established along with at least 4 ROMs: Stock, Prime (what I use), Revolver, and Android Revolution HD. Another has recently began as well. 

Now, my concern is what comes after the Transformer Prime, and whether or not it will be worth the upgrade from my TF101. Hehehe. I really hope that ASUS continues with the Transformer product line for a good while and keeps developing it. Either that, or when I retire Andrea, I will probably have to evaluate between a laptop or a tablet with accessors.

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+1 for waiting for the weekend: time to sit down and update my journal for the week 🙂