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Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re going to eat chili out of a can: Wolf chili is as good as you’re likely to get. Especially if you prefer chili without beans^, which are usually the kind that ends up more like dog food out of the can. The main reason I’ll buy canned chili with beans, is to have something less like dog food. Wolf brand chili  on the other hand, actually passes as an edible chili–despite its storage method.

In Florida: it wasn’t really that available as far as I can recall, I can’t remember eating it before coming to Georgia. Sometime after we had moved, my mother was thrilled at being able to find it at Wal-Mart, and always bought that when she could afford it. I think my father used to pack away plenty whenever he found himself back in Texas, or have relatives ship some once in a while, but that was all before my time.

In the end, I suppose I ended up a mixture of my parents, but I understand my father’s taste for the stuff. Typically, I aim for three kinds of chili.

  1. Cheap out of can that’s useful for cooking, the kind where it’s just going in a quick pan full of chili mac or something like that.
  2. Something to have for a snack once in a blue moon.
  3. Make fresh chili and try to have plenty of leftovers, instead of a massive gorge.

There’s nothing quite like a good freshly made chili. But if you can’t spend the day making yummy things, a can of Wolf Brand Chili does the trick. Actually, there’s probably two things that come out of a can that I actually have a high opinion of: Wolf chili, and that Ro-Tel stuff with the diced tomatoes and green chilis.

The cheap stuff is what I’ll usually keep stocked, since it’s useful for mixing into other stuff. Given the price tag attached to the good stuff, I rarely keep Wolf around the pantry, but you can bet sales are noted. And then there’s the holy grail: making my own.

I kind of debate whether making my own chili is cost effective. On one hand, batch quantity is quite large. On the other however is the fact that I’ll basically eat home made chili until I pass out, lol.

^ Some people wage holy war over the issue of beans and chili. My vote is eat whatever you want 😜.

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While I will admit, my main plans for Christmas involved video games, looking at my Steam wishlist sorted by price, the feeling is more like “Fuck me with a snowman, fuck me harder”.

Over the years, I generally made it a rule to only participate, much, in one of the major steam sales per year. In the past few years, I’ve mostly tried to avoid them all. But even an ostrich with his head buried in the sand can’t avoid them indefinitely…

A snowman makes a good frosty dildo, right?

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Resorting to the trap door clearance maneuver might be admitting default in trying to extricate all of your frozen french toast from the toaster. It is however a lot smarter than putting your fingers inside right after toasting something. Because that would be an oh so very stupid way of making a funny home video.

I find that Kroger’s frozen french toast sticks make a nice, simple, and cheap breakfast option. But it would be kind of nice if they weren’t split into the size of a large biscotti instead of something more like a slice of bread.

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Passing thought: when you find yourself trying to decide between turning the heat up or putting on pants, it can be hard to determine if the real problem is you or the winter weather.

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Working on my notes for tomorrow’s yet-another-meeting, I can’t help but find it curious how things have changed a bit.

Fifteen years ago when I got a laptop: notes were usually a sub directory in $HOME, pointed at removable media. Until the USB stick got bent, and then it was mostly just on my laptop.

Today, I don’t even use removable media much, aside from loading hardware via USB or backing up my laptop to a USB drive. My notes live else where. Most of my files live else where. The concept is still the same: destruction of my computer, the real loss is the hardware, not the data. But the way I interact with that data has evolved.

Also whoever decided to make the share this text selection menu be 90% permanently offscreen when it spans a few pages, can go eat an Apple.

This reminds me, I should put the monthly backup the entire shebang on my task list for the holidays.

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https://www.humblebundle.com/books/oreilly-classics-oreilly-books

While I can’t speak for the reference books, O’Reilly technical books are usually worth the money. Two on this list that I can vouch for are Programming Perl, as I own a hard copy of a previous edition, and Java in a Nutshell which is a rather good book for getting up to speed on the language.

I remember buying the Camel book for about $56 nearly a decade ago. Came for a means of thinking through the documentation that didn’t require alt+tab, stayed for the wonderful wit, anecdotes, and stories. If you’re serious about Perl, you probably should own a copy or three.

Java in a Nutshell, I had checked out from the public library over a decade ago wanting to brush up on how the language has evolved since my study, and really found its explanations wonderful. Especially if you’ve ever wondered why the answer to Generics in Java is so often no. The only Java  book on my shelf, by contrast was written while JDK had yet to reach a 1.0 release. Needless to say, I had needed updating, lol.

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One of the zillion ideas, or perhaps several of, that have been bouncing around my head of late is: “What if you designed a super carrier, that’s meant to carry its own battle group?”

This kind of got me to thinking. If you designed a super carrier around the idea of several hanger compartments, big enough to pack in 8 ~ 10 capital ships in destroyer or frigate tier sizes, that’s pretty useful. At which point, you may as well design the entire ship around its hangers, engines, and main guns.

We’d be talking about a very large ship. Something in the scale of a Covenant super carrier or an Executor class super stardestroyer–several kilometres of starship. All the more reason to basically build the ship around the guns, the hangers, and the engines, wrap the sucker in all the armour you can muster, and build vital crew services into the ship’s spine.

A follow on idea to this is the notion of a modular destroyer to accompany the super carrier. I mean, literally modular. Swapping out modules could adapt the destroyer from being focused on a point defense screen, or fit smaller Gauss cannons, etc. Swap hanger bays for mine dispensing packages. Need anti-ship torpedoes or the mother of all antimissile batteries? Swap a module. All the better if the aforementioned really big freaking super carrier was equipped to deal with that while underway, but outside of combat; because if you’re going big, bring some spare parts along.

Such a destroyer would go well with a carrier that is so freaking big that you can land the groups destroyers in the carrier, before making with the super duper space travel hijinks. Not to mention, good excuses to have a whole lotta starfighters, support craft, and probably the deck space to supply a planetary assault force or evacuate a small moon worth of people in a pinch.

Thus arriving at another idea that I’ve been putting around with for some years: that Gauss rifles and the like would be far more effective than some kind of damned phaser bank. You wanna knock the shit out of an enemy ship? Blast the fricken’ thing with a solvo of Gauss rifles. Run out of shit to fire out the Gauss rifle? Go mine an asteroid for something ferromagnetic worth processing into a coilgun slug. I imagine that much as cruise missiles took over the world of terrestrial navel combat, starships will rely principally on comparable missiles, and some really big coilguns for piercing uber thick armour is a requirement. Plus who doesn’t like to unleash some kinetic whoop ass?

I kind of picture a long rail of a ship. A quartet of forward firing large calibre Gauss cannons built into the four outer corners of the frame, and a long shaft running several kilometres. The sides of which amount to hanger bay after hanger bay after hanger bay; kind of like the hanger bay death crawls of Covenant ships in the original Halo, where you start wondering whether or not a ship can ever have enough hanger bays or if the engineers ran out of ideas.

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Ask Ethan: Could Octonions Unlock How Reality Really Works?
https://flip.it/QSQZt7

I’m not sure what’s bothering me more: how interesting I found this article, or that computer graphics is the primary reason quaternions doesn’t  elicit a blank stare rather than curiosity at the idea of octonions.

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Millennium Plus 20: How Photography Has Changed in The Last Two Decades
https://flip.it/rQPO96

One of the things I find amazing: is how phone cameras became everywhere, and then became so good that they’re up to recording our important memories. Computers and networking helped make sharing what we care about easier: but film isn’t so idiot proof at that, or for most people, that cost effective.

Over the past decade the amount of photos I’ve taken at home has risen, as cameras became everywhere plus better. By contrast, most of my childhood is either on photo prints, or still on rolls of 110mm film.