congrats, lady!

my baby sister got married on leap day. she eloped! i'm proud of her and happy for her, and i just wanted to congratulate her and wish her all the best and many happy years.

It came from the swamp...

I took my dead computer off to my friends' house this weekend. There was going to be an exceptionally high concentration of geekery there, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to use my friends for free tech support. Or for a source of expendable RAM that we could feed to my motherboard, however you want to view it. The good news is, they have a server with the same RAID controller that my dead motherboard sported so we were able to simply plug my drives in and watch them work. Yea! In addition to that, there was some griping and whining about the configuration of the case and how the video card was in the way of getting the drives out and blah blah blah cry cry cry whine whine whine blah blah blah. The hysterical bit about that is that the guy doing the crying was the one who PICKED THAT CASE IN THE FIRST PLACE. He spec'ed the computer for me three years ago, and my dear friend jaasper was the one who got stuck building it. I made stew and kept jaasper fed and watched him do all the crazy kit-bashing. I'd never done it before and while I'm certainly capable of reading the documentation and putting a kit together from scratch, it is far better to do such things with an advisor on hand. If the advisor is further willing to twist the tiny screwdriver himself in exchange for dinner, so much the better. Anyway, in the process of yanking the drives out of the box so they could be hooked up to the server, we discovered the most likely cause of the fried RAM. It was a WERE-CRICKET!!! (and it came from the swamp...)

A scary, hairy, desiccated, fried cricket slid out of the case when we pulled the cover off the backside. The hair was mostly dog-looking, but the way it was fused to the exoskeleton (I guess by the electricity?) the carcass quite seriously resembled a were-cricket. I had a computer bug!

Many, many thanks go to my friends for getting my hard drives back up and running so I could get all my data off them! Now I must merely bide my time, grow my patience, and refresh my web browser every 30 minutes until I see that my new Mac has shipped.

wow.

i don't know what to say about this but that it's just so pretty it makes my heart ache... i shiver listening to it, and not because it's 40 and raining in "hot"lanta. i've always loved this song, i've just never loved a recording of it before.


for laura h: The song is "Hallelujah" by Lenoard Cohen.
swiped from the youtube poster:
Canadian indie singer-songwriter Allison Crowe's uniquely potent interpretation is heard on her album, "Tidings".

woe.

MY MOTHERBOARD ATE MY RAM!!!!

on friday. *sob* happybox is dead.

i was trying to run a long, computationally heavy process on my home PC (which i had dubbed happybox) because my work computer was occupied with deadline-based work. i thought it was taking too long, so i popped into task manager to see how much RAM it was using, and discovered it was using much less than i expected. weird. i checked to make sure i had the right target total in my head and the computer only reported 1GB available. now... i could've SWORN i put 2 x 1GB sticks of RAM in the case, but y'know it's been a couple of years and i have no head for these sorts of hardware details. it's why i've never been a good gearhead. you can't describe a car as having "one of those 2.something litre V-whatever thingies" and expect to be taken seriously. so the total ram available was half what i expected, which meant it was time to troubleshoot.

so i shut 'er down, cracked open the case, looked into happybox and found 2 x 1GB sticks hanging out of the motherboard. right, then. that meant either one stick was not seated properly (and had never been?) or i had some bad ram. so i put rose to work on it, because i was frantically trying to finish that aforementioned deadline work. she swapped the sticks to other slots, but it still only reported 1GB, which meant that either one pair of slots (a channel) or one stick of RAM was bad, but we didn't know which. we tried swapping the sticks into opposite channels to narrow it down, and then the computer wouldn't boot. this meant the RAM in the primary slot was bad, and i assumed that because of this it wasn't reading the (nominally good) RAM in the secondary slot.

i didn't think it through because if i had, i'd have recognized at this point that my bad slot had fried the RAM in it and putting more RAM in the computer would be a waste of money. instead, i went to Fry's and bought more RAM. but when i got home, reason took hold of my brain before i even unwrapped the new stuff... which meant i tried to ID the bad slot before putting the new RAM in, just in case it was what had fried the old stick. either that first round of swapping sticks into opposing channels or something in this later troubleshooting step exposed my poor old good ram to a bad slot on the motherboard. i'll never really know. all i know for sure is that i have at least one bad slot on my motherboard, and by "bad slot" i mean "vicious ram-eating slot." it munched down 2 1GB sticks of ram on friday, and i'll be darned if i'm feeding it any more.

so, in light of this woe and tragedy, i'm buying myself a mac. because if i'm going to use MacOS, it's not going to be windows' bloated, big-brother-like version of MacOS (aka: Vista) it's going to be the real gosh-darned thing. and, well, mac runs wow in addition to VMWare, so all the fun stuff i want runs natively and anything i absolutely must have windows for, i can have on a Virtual Machine. color me silver. :)

happy birthday, sis!

to my beloved younger sister, a wish for a happy day with many happy returns!

rock on, boss...

my boss kinda rocks. actually, he rocks a lot. we recently had an exchange where i told him i was considering transferring off his team to a job that entailed less travel. i ended up staying where i am, because i like my job better than i'd have liked the other one, but it put him on notice. and that was good. so he said he'd take some steps to get me less travel and more variety.

i guess i still don't think that talking about things is really going to change them, because i expected my life to carry on just as it has and eventually by mid-summer i'd see the results of a gradual shift in my assignments. not so. he just told the people who've been borrowing my time that they have advanced all the time they're going to get until the end of june with what they have on my calendar now. color me thrilled and pleasantly surprised.

and to keep this post from being a complete snoozer for those of you who don't care what i do to earn my filthy lucre, i'll share that the carolina pizza & pasta works makes a TASTY shrimp etouffe in honor of the impending Mardi Gras holiday. ayeee! and they make GREAT crab cakes, too. *wink*

it's finally happened...

i've been recognized by the staff of my local starbucks. they know who i am and make conversation with me and recommend drinks i might like based on the variety of drinks i've ordered before. not being a creature of habit, i never order the same thing twice. well, unless it's early in the morning. early in the morning, i just stumble in clutching my travel mug and ask them to fill it up with whatever is on tap and has the most caffeine. that in itself probably ingrains me in the memories of the morning shift, but i'm not much for making conversation at that point in my day.

this recognition was by the night shift. this whole event probably has been delayed by the fact that i travel as much as i do, but i had hoped to avoid becoming a "regular" at starbucks. i suppose it was inevitable, though, given how much i love coffee. and the internet. and coffee.

i'm a nooyawkuh.

i spent last week in the vicinity of philadelphia for work. i was teaching a class at the corporate mothership and it was nice to get to walk around and shake hands with people i only know via e-mail. there used to be a lot of confusion about me and another woman with my name who worked in that office. she would occasionally get my travel itineraries or expense checks, i would get help requests that were directed to her, sometimes my flight schedules would return me "home" to the philly airport. she recently left the company, so the confusion is much reduced, but i still took the opportunity to introduce myself in person to the folks who keep my work rolling along.

then, rose came up to spend the weekend with me. she has a dear friend who lives near philly, the one we visited at halloween. i had been staying with him all week instead of in a hotel near the office, so she came up and joined me.

friday night we spent painting the kitchen. rose has an amazing and fantastic skill (which is for rent, if you make appropriate arrangements with me...) at home renovation: she can "cut-in" paint freehand. that's right... NO BLUE TAPE required. she just stands on top of a ladder with her tongue sticking out one corner of her mouth, paintbrush in one hand, paint cup in the other, and makes PERFECTLY straight lines along the wall/ceiling boundary. i'm pretty good at stringing up painter's tape and working the edge, but by the time i can get a room taped, rose can already be done cutting in so it's ready for paint rollers. i'm seriously in awe. so the homeowner rolled paint on the walls, rose cut the walls in ahead of him, and i? i did the perfect job for a very patient, slightly anal retentive engineer in a kitchen renovation being run by artist-types: i removed all the nasty old pink contact paper from the cabinets. it was foul. and you'd think after all these years the glue would've lost some of its hold, right? not so. apparently, those 50's contact paper manufacturers had not yet glommed onto the disposable world mentality. that stuff was stuck on so tightly, i started theorizing that it'd formed a symbiotic life form with the wood paneling of the cabinets. i fantasized that i was peeling up entire civilizations of some very sticky higher life form, cutting them into strips with a razor and harvesting them so they could go to the landfill, convert more of our household garbage, and someday take over the world! muahahahahahahaha!!! or maybe it was just really late at night and something in the sushi was getting to me.

the next day, we got up and drove to new york city to see Avenue Q on broadway. and by "we got up and drove," i really mean that we all piled into my rent car and i had to do urban battle from behind the wheel of a rented saturn. i survived without too many country-mouse-in-the-big-city moments, and even earned the hoots and applause of all my passengers when i flipped off and honked at some ignorant redneck in a land rover with alabama plates when he cut me off. i got us where we were going, used lola's navigational skills to find us good parking, and did all of that in time to pre-order us some wine for the intermission. w00t!

after the show, we walked down to the empire state building, where we were turned into mice, lured with stale limburger through a maze of passages, elevators, snaked lines, gift shops, hawkers, vampires, and cranky tourists, and finally got out onto the observation deck. it was pretty up there, the view was beautiful, and a bit overwhelming. you know, at one level, in your head that there really are that many people in the city. but until you stand up there and look out at all the twinkling lights, it doesn't really hit you JUST HOW MANY people are in the city. rose showed me all her favorite haunts from her college days, as far as you can see them from the top of the empire state building at night anyway, and then we headed back down for dinner.

we taxi'd to little italy, found a likely-looking spot, and settled in for a truly delicious meal. i had lobster fra diavolo, the red version, and it was served in a bowl approximately the size of a tire. from a semi. f'real. we had to move EVERYTHING on the table just so they could wedge this bowl in before me. the funny thing about shellfish, though, is that it's like 80's hair: lots of hard shell, little actual content. by the time i'd shelled the lobster, the clams, and the mussels i had a manageable-sized meal and didn't feel overstuffed. but i did feel richly and extravagantly treated. so it worked. yum! the fra diavolo red sauce was spicy and tangy and just what i wanted.

i made it home in time to play my geeky game where we wiped out three times attempting an assault on karazhan - a big, difficult dungeon - with a pick-up group of people who weren't really prepared. only a few of us knew what we were doing. it was good learning, but i look forward to trying it again sometime in a group that survives the whole experience. :)

oh, and i got my first official philly cheesesteak. and, yeah, it really is that much better than what you get out here in the hinterlands. i'll have to go back!

Training this week...

in an interesting turn of events, this week i'm a student. and i've been reminded of all sorts of teaching technique things that i think i do well, but will be doubly certain that i do correctly in future. little things like: giving path names two or three times when pointing students to deeply buried files, going slowly in my demonstrations, explaining in plain english...

also, i am reminded of all the horrifying experiences i've had in the past with software that almost, but didn't, work. i feel really badly for the guy whose class fell apart yesterday afternoon, but it was an awful thing to sit through from our end. some of it was his fault, some of it wasn't.

today is a good day, though. by this time yesterday, i wanted to close my laptop in disgust and go play Warcrack. today, i still want to close my laptop and play Warcrack, but without the disgust. i'm just an addict...

contagion

i got an earworm from a guy who got an earworm, so have an earworm... it's a neat song and a good video. if those old microsoft office commercials (you know, the ones where people danced around their offices because they were so happy about their latest excel-created success?) had used something like this, i might've believed them.

not smart enough without my coffee

i often joke when i go refill my coffee cup, that i'm "off to get another cup of brains." and people laugh, because it's kinda silly to think of a person's intelligence coming out of a cup.

today, we have proof that i'm not COMPLETELY joking when i say these things. i started to pour my first cup of coffee this morning and got halfway into it when i realized i was pouring it onto my oatmeal instead of into my mug! i had coffee and brown sugar oatmeal this morning, which was not half bad.

merry christmas!

nothing puts you in the christmas spirit quite like watching kids experience christmas for the first time. their wonder, innocence, and inquisitiveness are a beautiful sight to behold and good for the soul. so, thanks to my nieces for reminding me of how much PURE FUN christmas can be. i've never been scrooge-y about christmas. i've always enjoyed it, although i sometimes give in to the stressful feelings of having too much to do and not enough time to do it in.

it's a blessing to be here at my parents' house, watching 2 year olds "decorate" the christmas tree by (literally) throwing bows at it. the redhead throws with purpose and makes them stick. the blonde tends to throw (goddess forgive me for saying this) like a girl, so hers fall off and her sister has to reapply them. we've taken all the bows off and thrown them at the tree three or four times now, because it's fun. "nana" has strong memories of how frustrating childhood is when all you want is to explore and play, and all the grown-ups keep doing is telling you "no-no, that's [dangerous, breakable, hot, not-for-kids, etc.]" she has done her best to make her house a totally explorable, kid-friendly zone. all the breakable, heirloom decorations are either on high shelves or still in storage. everything that's out is either dollar-store quality and won't be missed if they break it, or tough enough to survive their exploration activities. the kids are loving it, and so are we.

and now, back to it. i'm in charge of the cooking. technical challenge of the weekend: making popcorn in a pan on the stove. my sister is on an allergen-free diet, and there are no microwave popcorns that conform. she showed me how to do it, and aside from a few burned kernels, i think i did alright. it certainly had a down-home taste to it that i don't think i was imagining.

signs...

...that you really need to go to a holiday party and behave irresponsibly and indulge with excess until you forget that you have a dayjob, number 1:

Your Friend says, "Hey, let's stop at the store on the way to the party and get something to drink." Whereupon you reply, "Yes, we need to leverage the opportunity to work through the process and procure some supplies." And when your friend's jaw drops to the floor and asks if you did, or did not, just assault her with meaningless buzzwords you reply, "What did I say?"

That's right, kids. If you find yourself inadvertently spewing business buzzwords to your friends, on your weekends, and you DON'T EVEN REALIZE YOU'VE DONE IT, you need to have a large frosty glass of holiday cheer, or a meat mallet to the head. Take whichever you prefer, but take it soon.

hearsay...

i heard this story about my niece recently, and i've been telling it to anyone who will listen. so here it is...
(setting)
my sister is walking past the bedroom of her two year old twin girls, with her 6 month old baby on her hip. she notices one of them fast asleep, and the other one lying in bed talking to herself. she decides to check in to make sure the talker doesn't need a diaper change or juice or something only moms can give.

SISTER: *walks in and lays baby on foot of bed* Honey, are you ok?
TALKY TWIN: I love Jesus.
SISTER: I love Jesus, too, honey. And he loves us, like his children.
TALKY TWIN: *gives her mother a you're-not-getting-it look* No, I love BABYJESUS! *points, for emphasis, at her sister at the foot of the bed*
SISTER: *ROFL*

apparently, the toddlers have been learning about babyjesus at school, as is the way this time of year. and somehow, in the brain of a toddler, Baby Sister and Baby Jesus have conflated into one thing. so right now, sister is babyjesus, and sometimes just Jesus.

oh, and while i'm at it...

happiest of happy birthday wishes to Squirt, Fluffy, and Trouble. all three of you are in my heart and in my thoughts today. for the brief, feverish moments that i was awake yesterday, i thought of you then, too. :) but that might have just been the fever dreams...

Did anybody get the number of that truck... ?

It hit me like a truck, it did. I thought at first it had to be bacterial, simply because my throat was so sore and my fever was so persistent. It turned out to be a virus, after q-tips up the nose, lights down the throat, and a blood donation were all tested and reviewed. Either that, or I'm allergic to snow. It might be both, come to think of it. Michigan last week gave me plenty of opportunity to be exposed to both. After having slept for 40 of the last 48 hours, I can now say that I'm feeling fine. So, the truck loses, and I win. And, for the sake of irony, I would like to report that Saginaw airport loads and unloads their aircraft in much better STYLE than O'Hare in Chicago does. When you have checked a bag planeside because the aircraft is too small to accommodate your standard roll-aboard overnight suitcase, and you have to STAND OUTSIDE IN THE HORIZONTAL SLEET to recover said bag, you know you've arrived in travel hell. And I'll tell ya, ladies and gents, Chicago has a lot to learn from Saginaw on that score.

This week, I'm off to Knoxville, TN. If I return without my hair glowing green or anything, I'll be pleasantly surprised. Apparently the facility I'm visiting has enough hazardous areas to warrant an online safety training that is required for all visitors. So now I know not to cross the magenta ropes that are marked "RADIOACTIVE HAZARD AREA". Thanks to the training, I'm safely prepared. :P

want.

wow, do i want this clock.

Free Rice Vocabulary Game

Free Rice is a website in the vein of The Hunger Site, The Breast Cancer Site, etc. Visitors to the website click on a link, view a couple of advertisements, and the revenue generated goes to a charitable cause. This one is affiliated with the United Nations and is set up as one of my personal favorite activities of all time - a word game! yea! So, if you go visit the site and answer a vocabulary question correctly, you donate 10 grains of rice. The game keeps a running total, with special counters for 100-grain and 1000-grain piles, while the latest grains go into your "bowl".

My high for today was a vocabulary level of 47, but most of the time i was around 44 or 45. I donated about 1500 grains doing that. I shot right up to 45 quickly, but then knocked around the 43-46 range for a good long time. Once I made it to 47, I came over here to write it up. :)

writer's block

lately i'm suffering a bit of writer's block. i simply don't have anything to say. i've tried to fight through it with a couple of half-assed memes, but that's not really working. so today, i'm going to tell you about the outstanding dinner i made for rose's birthday last night. alas, i'm not nerdy enough to have taken photos, so you'll have to imagine what it looked like.

the main course was buffalo steak in a tart cherry sauce; the sides were butternut squash and wilted spinach with caramelized onion. the cherry sauce was a huge experiment, and i'm pleased to say that all reporters either enjoyed it or lied convincingly. it was the first time in a very long time that i cooked without tasting the dish all through the process, so even i was pleasantly surprised. however, we did start all three dishes with the 2 crucial steps of melting 2 tbsp butter and pouring 2 oz wine into the cook, so it was hard to go wrong from there.

i sent rose to the store for all the odd ingredients that i don't keep in my kitchen, like sun-dried oregon cherries. i have maraschino cherries, but those aren't quite the same and could never be classed as 'tart'. unless maybe they were in a beverage called a 'tart' because of its umm... effect on chicks who drink fruity things with cherries in them and umbrellas on top. rose had to call me three or four times from the store for direction and substitution options because Whole Foods doesn't prominently display plum wine or sun-dried cherries. as a result, we ended up with some Organic Tibetan Goji Berries, which i thought was a hoot. according to wiki, the "tibetan" part is probably a big fat lie marketing strategy because the tibetan plateau is remarkably unsuitable for commercial fruit production, even if it were organic production. the goji berries were very close to the cherries, and were quite prominently displayed, according to rose. for those who wonder, they are quite tasty little boogers, kinda like a dried cranberry, but with just a hint of savory about them and not so fruity-sweet. think of an early strawberry that's ripe enough to be red, but not ripe enough to be particularly sweet yet.

the squash was tasty and uber-simple. i halved it and scraped out the seeds and pulp (which are remarkably pumpkin-like) and then scored the flesh deeply with a knife. i smeared it with butter, dropped a tablespoon of extra butter into the hollow, sprinkled it liberally with nutmeg, covered each half with foil and set it foil side down on a cookie sheet to bake at 350 for an hour. yum! i love me some winter squash. rose had never eaten it before, so she now has a new seasonal food addiction. plus, it's a nice carrot-free source of beta carotene. have any of you noticed how grocery store carrots taste these days? they pretty much taste like dirt. bleh.

for the spinach, i minced some garlic and slivered some onion into about 2 tbsp of olive oil in my honkin' weapons-grade cast iron skillet. then i tossed in a bag of baby spinach until the whole mass was about halved in size. i pulled it off the fire and put it into a bowl where i drizzled it with balsamic vinegar and LOTS of lemon juice. probably about the juice of half a lemon, if i were one of those nutty cooks-from-scratch types. but i'm not, so the juice came out of those darling plastic lemon-shaped bottles with the long pour spout. i guess that's there just so you don't inadvertently grab the unnaturally shiny yellow bottle thinking it's an actual lemon. as far as i can tell, the spout serves only to make it look like a lemon with a strange protuberance that might be a tumor...

the buffalo steaks were marinated in equal parts balsamic vinegar and worcestershire sauce, with a generous addition of lemon juice, black pepper, pickled ginger, and bavarian herb mix. for the cherry sauce, i used 1/2 a medium sized sweet onion, sauteed in butter, about a cup of apple juice, cup of cranberry juice, 3 tbsp sweet red wine (i used a beaujolais nouveau because we couldn't find plum), a cup of dried cherries, and a half cup of Genuine Organic Tibetan Goji Berries. then i made a sachet out of cheesecloth and into it i put a bay leaf, 4 black peppercorns, 3 whole cloves, 1 clove garlic and all the pickled ginger i could fish out of the marinade. i simmered the whole lot for about 20 or 30 minutes. i removed about 1/2 cup of the cherries from the sauce and set them aside. i pulled out the sachet, as well. then i put the sauce into a blender and made it smooth. i topped each steak with the sauce and a few of the whole cherries.

nom nom nom!

rose was in charge of cooking the meat, which i assume she did on the grill outside. she ran off with the marinating dish when i told her she had about 10 minutes left, and when she came back, there was a plate of medium-rare buffalo steaks in her hand. it is good to have a sous chef, no?

happy birthday, love!

meme sheep says baaaaaaa!

You Are 68% Open Minded

You are a very open minded person, but you're also well grounded. Tolerant and flexible, you appreciate most lifestyles and viewpoints. But you also know where you stand firm, and you can draw that line. You're open to considering every possibility - but in the end, you stand true to yourself.

How Open Minded Are You?