Notes from The Wulf

My internet swami asked me to...

May 30, 2008
Post a comment

...Post a link to http://www.freakangels.com ? Just to remind people
we're still here and still pumping out free comics episodes once a week.
Memories get short on the old intarwubs.

Hell, you could even use

http://seed.sproutbuilder.com/LACofd2ABL8Bmckn

the FREAKANGELS RSS Window, which auto-updates every Friday.

Thanks.
-W

Curried Meat Pies

Apr 29, 2008
Post a comment

Curried Meat Pies
makes 8 pies. Cost: $16

1 lb Ground meat (lamb for me)
3 medium yellow onions, diced
1/2 cup frozen snow peas
1/2 cup turnips, diced
2-3 T freshly ground Curry powder (I used World Spice Market Capetown Masala)
1 t Sea salt
1 T cooking oil
Cayenne pepper (optional)

2 pkg Pillsbury Pastry dough, thawed

Preheat oven to 425

Saute onions in oil in large skillet until clear, add Curry, half salt, and continue to saute until onions start to brown.

Brown meat separately in medium skillet, stirring constantly to get a fine, even size to the ground meat. Once the meat is hot enough to drain off the fat, then add meat, and additional salt, to the curry pan and continue to brown. Add turnips and peas and cook until peas are bright green. At this point the meat is cooked and you can taste it to see if more salt or spice needs to be added.

On a lightly floured surface, unfold one pastry shell and cut into halves. Pastry dough may be stretched to desired size or shape, but too thin will not support a full meat filling. If the dough tears, dampen with a drop of water and press together.

Spoon the filling into the halves and fold in any artistic manner you desire. Press dough edges together with a fork and place on lightly greased baking sheet. Bake at 425 for 12 minutes.

http://worldspice.com/home/home.shtml

New camera

Mar 22, 2008
Post a comment

New camera sunset

2 comments

My father bought me a new digital camera for my birthday. It arrived a day late to go with me out to the Peninsula on Wednesday (a post I have yet to finish), but I did take it out for a spin yesterday on my lunch break. I still need to buy a memory card for it--Sony moved to much smaller MemorySticks since my last camera was made. This is a Sony

W80-front-angled

DSC-W80, a compact black pocket model. Someday I might end up getting an SLR but I feel I have a lot to learn before I bother with the more expensive, fragile models. I

I promise more photos, sunsets, and something from my trip to the beach and Cape Flattery soon.

Prime, again!

Mar 14, 2008
2 comments

Scud - cowboys never quit

This image shamelessly stolen from the comic book, Scud, issue 22. If you're nerd enough to know Scud, then great. If not, well then you should investigate if you need to be that kind of Nerd, because Cowboys Never Quit.

This message brought to you by the number 31. That's how old I am today. Happy Birthday to me!

***Bonus: This week a new Serenity Comic, Better Days #1 by Joss Whedon shipped. Check your local comic stores!

RIP Howard Gobioff 1971 - 2008

Mar 12, 2008
Post a comment

It is the duty of the living to honor the memories of those that go before us.

There is a very nice piece on Howard on CMU's alumni site.

An Unplanned Day Should Not Count As Wasted

Mar 12, 2008
Post a comment

Screenshot-2

This is my new desktop look. I am proud of it, this cost me 6 hours of my day. An experiment in copying drives destroyed my Ubuntu root installation this morning, before I had eaten or gotten any caffeine. This is my first lesson for the day, it is a very bad time to be using sudo privileges. I had wanted to migrate off the old, loud, power-hungry SCSI drive onto a sleek, fast and relatively quiet SATA drive, but instead I failed to consider the symbolic links involved. I wasted several hours reading community docs on how to maybe patch the install after critical files were deleted before finally initiating a re-install.
What I did learn: Ubuntu installs pretty easily, but GRUB (a booting program) is very finicky and will try to install on the first IDE device it detects, instead of the root drive selected in the OS install. GRUB will not recognize Ubuntu as a bootable OS on a SATA drive when sitting comfortably on and IDE drive.
Also, I learned to just partition a drive instead of trying to rm the files from it.
With a brand-new install I have found much greater functionality. My previous install had been from a 32-bit disk and involved upgrading to a 64-bit kernel, and in that process I must have missed a lot because gnome themes and desktop effects work much better. I also found a program called Exaile that proposes to work as well as Amarok but in the GTK frontend--the standard for gnome GUI--allowing it to take this beautiful dark skin. Later, I may indulge my vanity and spend an hour looking for a proper wallpaper.

Devil's Advocate

I may not have gotten the chores, shopping and cooking done today that I had planned, but I learned quite a bit about my operating system, and especially learned the dangers of administrating while half-asleep.

RIP Jeff Healey

Mar 3, 2008
Post a comment

The Jeff Healey Band - 07 - While My Guitar Gently Weeps

The Jeff Healey Band

1 comment

RIP Jeff Healey, Blues/Jazz/Rock Guitar God, 1967-2008

FTE Interviews, round 2

Feb 18, 2008
Post a comment

I had two more interviews towards Full Time Employment at Zillow.com today. One was with the head of the Windows IT guys, who said mostly fabulous things about me and that he was very Pro-Wulf for hiring me. The second was with my Boss and he just asked me what the others asked and how I answered. There were no technical questions during the process at all.
The next step I believe is to be offered full-time wages and benefits, which will either be good or not.

I should also meet this week with my Comsys representative--this is the company through which I have been contracting since my arrival in the City on the Edge of the Future. If for some wild, unexpected reason the FTE does not work out they will be my next best line on employment.

Breath

Pearl Jam

Operator Files: Urban Explorer

Feb 17, 2008
Post a comment

2271700135_73e11dd018_m

One of the other Operators I work with is into urban exploration, and shared some photos he took on his weekend with me. This is one of them. He found a building in South Lake Union about to be torn down, but covered in amazing graphiti. This is one of the more amazing images--the strange poetry is actually part of the wall art and not added later. There are more images in his flickr account: raytracing.

Love Always Trumps Hate

Feb 17, 2008
Post a comment

03-ByakheeByakhee

There are some things that I love that can trump my distaste for other things. I love Giant Monsters, but I hate hand-cam movies--but my love for the Titanic Terrors trumps my dislike so I am pro-Cloverfield (even though I may never be able to watch it again).
Similarly, I hate musicals--a hybrid media that usually combines the worst of both music and stage. But I love anything to do with HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft was a mad genius who's mother dressed him like a girl for most of his childhood, and may or may not have been stark raving mad. But he knew a thing or two about his audience and shared his imagination with several other contemporary authors to form a more complete universe in which his particular horror could thrive. He is the father of modern horror, and though to read his stuff now is difficult for his thick prose, the core concepts of terror are timeless and not dependent on culture or language.

Shoggoth on the Roof is a satirical musical that crosses the famous Jewish Musical and the highlights of the most famous Mythos stories. The production quality on the CD album alone should be enough evidence of Lovecraft's genius--that 80 years later people are still inspired by his stories.