ChaosEngine

Bradley Robertson, someone I follow on Brightkite had posted to their blog asking “What kind of Geek Are You?”   They referenced the 56 Geeks Project, where Scott Johnson has done a series of drawings of 56 different types of geeks.  A wrote a response to the question, but after reading it, decided it sounded a little over the top, so I mocked myself in anohter comment.

Since I’ve been too unmotivated to write any new entries here, I figured I would just post my answer here as well.  So, What type of Geek am I?

A while back I sent a comment into a podcast I listen too asking what some of their favorite whiskey’s were and telling them a few of mine. The people on the show are really into good expensive Scotch, and I wanted to hear their opinions on some other spirits. I was kind of surprised that instead of hearing what they liked, they instead put their effort into ridiculing my tastes in whiskey and commenting that I evidently didn’t know what good whiskey was.

May be. I’ve been drinking whiskey (and whisky) for less than a decade, the ability to relax and enjoy a good drink is something I came to rather late in my life. I can’t claim to have a sophisticated palette, I can’t taste 47 separate flavors in a swig of Scotch. I also don’t believe that spending $100 on a bottle of liquor makes me a better, more refined person.

The people on the podcast are good folks. They are fun and intelligent and when I’ve met them they’ve been nice and friendly. Why my choice of spirits should turn them into obnoxious snobs is a little hard to grasp. I really feel that in their search for the perfect drink they’ve lost sight of the real point. The magic in a bottle of whiskey isn’t in the exotic location it was distilled or the years it has sat in aged barrels.

The magic in whiskey is in the friends that raise a glass with you and the simple pleasure of shared experience. It’s sad that some lose sight of that. I do not intend to.

Sláinte

Ahh, food. If there is any good side to being a fat guy, it is the ability to enjoy good food without worrying about what it will do to your health or figure. Those times do come, but generally a long time after a meal, like the next day when getting dressed for work. So any feelings of guilt or remorse are sufficiently removed from the time of eating that it doesn’t interfere with the enjoyment of it.

Today I made a couple of batches of a simple but tasty desert called Grunt. Grunt is a dessert, supposedly from New England. Though I never encountered or even heard of it during my three years in Maine. I discovered it at an unlikely place, a podcasting panel at DragonCon where the Firefly fan podcast, The Signal, presented it as a possible recipe for the Firefly Verse.

Read more…

For a long time I have been a minimalist when it came to cell phones.  I just wanted a phone you could make a call on.  I didn’t need to browse the web, take pictures, play games, or any of the other dozens of things you can do on phones nowadays.  In fact I was quite frustrated by several phones I’ve had that seemed to do all of these other things at the expense of actually being able to easily make a decent quality phone call.  My frustration reached its pique when I got a Verizon XV6700 for work.  It was a Windows Mobile Smartphone, and one of the most useless pieces of technology I’ve ever encountered.  Of course this may have been because it was forced to sync up with Novell Groupwise.  Novell seems to screw up every Windows PC it touches, no reason for Windows Mobile to be spared.  Nonetheless, there were many glaring design flaws outside of its contamination by Novell.  At the first opportunity I ditched it and went back to just a plain old cell phone.

Enter Brightkite.  I’ve spoken of Brightkite before.  It made me actually want to participate in one of these silly social network Twitterish experiences.  Problem, Verizon doesn’t support it.  Now I’ve run into this before.  When I had the XV6700 there were several mobile apps I tried to install but couldn’t, because Verizon didn’t allow it.  Even with my old LG8300 there were many features that I had to use a program called bitpim to access since Verizon locks their phones down to such a ridiculous level.  The final straw came when I actually tried to forward my phone to another number, a feature that is included on my service.  It didn’t work.  I talked to a Verizon Rep, they told me it should work, maybe I wasn’t doing it right.  I verified I could do it on my wife’s phone, same model.  So I talked to Verizon again.  Once again I’m told it should work.  Once again I tell them it doesn’t.  Then I’m told that since it is a corporate account they can’t help me and I will need to go through my accounts corporate contact. To hell with that.

Read more…

Saturday night was a trip up to O’Malley’s In Weston. Hadn’t been there for a few months, and my brother wanted to go seeBob Walkenhorst. Bob was the lead singer in a local KC band called the Rainmakers back in the 80s, and since I had been a fan of them I figured what the hell. On the way to Weston I got a call from my friend Tony, who coincidentally, was calling to see if I wanted to go to O’Malley’s. So, I arrived at O’Malley’s with my brother and a bit later Tony showed up with Amanda (not sure what to call her since she objected to the label of girlfriend), and another old friend, Mark. Tony and Mark had both been interns for me in the electronics lab when I first worked at DeVry. Mark moved to Arizona yeas ago so it was cool to see him again. Though I’m not quite sure if he is right in the head. He kept talking about running, in Arizona. As Doz put it, “Skinny people do some weird shit”.

At any rate, the music was great. Jeff Porter, another local musician, Joined Bob Walknhorst on stage and they played some old Rainmakers tunes as well as lots of new stuff. It was cool hanging out with my brother which I haven’t done for awhile, and the addition of Tony, Amanda, and Mark to the mix just made it that much more fun.

Since I was the driver, I was taking it easy on the drink, but decided to try the signature drink at O’Malley’s, oddly enough called tThe O’Malley. The O’Malley consists of Guinness, Vodka, and Tabasco Sauce. Now I don’t care much for Guinness, blasphemy I know, but I’ve never found a beer I like. I figured though that if anything could kill the taste of Guinness, Vodka and Tabasco Sauce should do the trick. It actually wasn’t too bad. My lips burned a bit, but I definitely liked it better than straight Guinness, though it isn’t destined to be my favorite drink.
Doz snapped a few pictures on his camera:

May head to O’Malley’s again this weekend. Flannigan’s Right Hook is playing, and they should be worth the trip.

IT is an interesting place to work. The information infrastructure is increasingly becoming a critical component for normal business operations. Yet IT is often overlooked, with no attention being given to it until something goes wrong. Your average IT worker is probably unknown to 90% of the company, receiving no praise when things simply work as they should, but being raked over the coals for any minor glitch in the system, even if it is nothing they have any control over. Buggy software, faulty hardware, unrealistic budgets, and clueless users can all combine to make IT a nightmare, and many tech workers adopt a bunker mentality to deal with this. It’s hard to blame them.

However I think that the bunker isn’t where IT belongs. Innovation is providing us with the tools to change how we work and live. New technologies and exciting new ways to apply old technologies offer some pretty amazing opportunities. Too often though these opportunities are missed because the people that should be championing the implementation of them are too busy putting out fires and covering their asses. Too many of them are either bitter over past experiences, or petty control freaks that aren’t open to any change that isn’t their idea.

Read more…

I think that sums up how I feel about the recent outrage over a Dunkin Donuts advertisement that featured Rachel Ray wearing…..a scarf.

A scarf, a piece of fringed cloth wrapped around her neck and draped over her shoulders has led a small but oh so vocal group of right wing idiots and sensationalists to condemn Dunkin Donuts and Rachel Ray as terrorist sympathizers because the scarf looks like an article of clothing worn by middle-easterners. Oh the horror (and I don’t just mean in relation to my terrible run-on sentence there).

I saw some guys from Iraq wearing pants, does that mean I have to wear my kilt now, or risk being mistaken for a terrorist? Bin Laden has a beard, so do I, so I’m probably screwed anyway. Might as well dust off the turban and explosive laden vest.

How have we reached a point where wearing an article of clothing that kind of resembles something that someone from a foreign culture wears marks you as a terrorist sympathizer?  For that matter are we maybe jumping the gun a little to assume everyone that doesn’t look, talk, and think just like us are threats to our civilization?

I’m really disappointed that Dunkin Donuts caved on this and pulled the add. I would really love to see some corporation just stand up and say to hell with you. If you are that stupid we don’t really want you as our customers. I would go out of my way to do business with any company that had the guts to do that.

The terrorists have pretty much won at this point. Call off the jihad, there is nothing more you need to do. We have become too ignorant as a nation to survive, no point in going out of your way to destroy us, we aren’t worth the effort.

I’ve commented before about my love/hate relationship with Twitter. Actually love/hate isn’t really correct, because those are both powerful emotions. My feelings about Twitter have been much closer to apathy. I simply do not have the need to know what a bunch of other people are doing/thinking at the moment. Nor do I feel an overwhelming need to give people constant small sound bites about my life. It can be interesting in small doses, but I very quickly lose interest. I have a blog for putting the occasional thoughts out there I want to share. Those that are interested can come check it out once in awhile.

However there is a new social networking tool out there now, and its called BrightKite.

Read more…

I recently read a post on my brother’s blog about how he was in love with the idea of social networking, but didn’t really feel like he had anything worth sharing. I know how he feels. Of course, this has never really stopped me as countless blog posts and podcasts will attest to.

I think the problem is that we get into these social networks, and start following the lives of people that we admire and want to be like. We get these glimpses into their lives and see what they are working on and we think to ourselves, “Wow, that is so cool, I wish I could be involved in something like that.” Then we go back to our dull lives wishing that only we lived in the right place or hung out with the right group of people so we could do interesting things with our lives. It is an easy trap to fall into.

Read more…

Last night I took the first of what is to be several cooking classes at the KC Culinary Center. I was a little apprehensive at first, thinking perhaps I was a bit out of my class and my league. However both the staff at the center and the other people in the class were all extremely nice. I’m not exactly a social person, but it really was a lot of fun talking with the people at my table and cooking with total strangers.

The class was Homestyle Asian, supposedly a look at real Asian food the way it would be prepared at home. It was taught by Matt and Sophia Chatfield, a married couple, both of which are accomplished chefs. Sophia is from Indonesia, so she is the source of much of the “authentic homestyle” cooking.

I had a great time and learned a lot. I got to make my first sushi roll, which was awesome. In fact I’m a little dubious about the high price of sushi after seeing how simple it was to make. Next week I’m taking a class dedicated to making sushi with the same instructors. A couple of weeks after that I have a thai cooking class with them.

It was one of the cooler experiences I’ve had in a while and I’m looking forward to taking a lot more of them. They have a few more Asian cooking classes, but tons of other things as well. Grilling, smoking, Mexican, Italian, baking, chocolate, and just about any other kind of specialty food prep you can think of. Hopefully I can work my way through the Asian series this year, then start working on some of the others.

If you’re gonna be a fat man, you may as well be a happy one.