Yerg, missed blogging for a long time again. Stuff keeps coming up.

Food porn:

On the left, one of the cheeseburgers I made last week. The two on the right are of the dinner we had Saturday night: Nothing but hors d’œuvres! The first plate is a bunch of canapés, variously consisting of smoked oysters, Huntsman cheese, almond pesto (homemade), Inglehoffer stone ground mustard, Gruyère, grated parmesan, and salmon. The second plate is devilled eggs. I make mine pretty simply: Egg yolk, pepper, mayonnaise (I like Best Foods), a little sweet mustard (it’s easy to ruin the filling by using too much), and paprika sprinkled on top. (Fill with an A.B. pastry bag, AKA Ziploc-with-the-corner-snipped-off.)

Welp, Top Chef season three is over. I’m glad Hung won and not Dale. Before the finale, I kept telling Brett that if Dale won I wouldn’t watch next season — the guy skated by for almost the whole competition and only got good (lucky?) in the last couple episodes. I still think Casey deserved it most though. She didn’t do great in the last challenge, but she was more consistent than the other two and her presentation was almost always the best.

Finished Permutation City. It was really good; not quite as fun as Schild’s Ladder, but better than Teranesia. Definitely more “paradigm shifting” than either. I really liked the “dust theory” concept (which was a little hard to grok at first), but I never quite got why the Garden-of-Eden packages were necessary. If all the states of a given process exist somewhere in spacetime, why did they have to launch anything? Wasn’t it already running (and would have ran even if they’d never decided to launch)? I really disliked that the Thoms Riemann storyline ended so bleakly. I mean, the (Elysium-based) Peer & Kate subplot was sad too, but at least it had a hopeful, if twisted, ending. It echoed the Maria/Paul stuff well.

Ohhh… actually, now that I think about it, all the couples (Peer/Kate, post-launch Peer/Kate, Paul/Maria, real-world Paul/Maria, Thomas/Anna, Paul/Elizabeth, Aden/Maria) were just different permutations of the same relationship. Even the Francesca/Maria relationship, with Francesca refusing to get scanned, was part of the same thread. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. Fundamentally, all those stories were about people being separated because of their ideologies. And the last permutation of Peer & Kate (where he disolves into the inhabitants of a new world to make her happy) sort of demonstrates an interpersonal version of dust theory — even though all these people eventually moved apart in some way, they were still together. The Copy of Paul “lobotomizing” himself to please Maria just brought it full circle. Man, just about everything I read of Egan’s leaves me in awe.

Anyway… Sean came over on Saturday. We played a bunch of games (Wii darts and Jenga, mostly) and caught up with each other. I can’t believe he’s flying radar planes! And living in the south! At 5:30 we had lunch with his sister and a bunch of her friends at Nuevo Vallarta. The food was okay, but not as good as the Mexican places back in the Tri-Cities.

Boy, DreamHost’s abbazaba server is sooo much better than virgil. Check out these uptime stats (and compare to last month’s):

99.96%! That’s actually better than what Krunk’s getting, according to Pingdom. (Haha, sorry Krunk!) Not quite as good as Peter’s uptime though (100.00% for as long as I’ve been monitoring it at 1 minute intervals). Anyway, I’m actually happy with DreamHost again. Guess I’ll renew my contract with them. I sent ‘em a thank-you note via the ticket system and got this back:

Excellent! I’m glad to hear this is working out for you!! =) As is the case with many problems in our system, they tend to be localized (We have over 2000 servers currently). If you ever need any additional assistance, let us know.

I drove to Moscow today to deposit a check for some web design I did back in May… guess who forgot banks are closed on Columbus Day? Really sucked because the road construction delays on ID-8 were longer than usual. Criminently! How long are they going to be widening that highway?

What else? Bender’s Big Score is coming out on November 27th; already pre-ordered it through Amazon. Team Fortress 2 (non-beta) will be out on Steam the day after tomorrow. Looking forward to that. Oh, and I’m going to be in Pasco this weekend — gotta take care of my parents’ animals while they’re in Buckley for Jenny Nearhood’s wedding. I’ll probably leave Friday and return Sunday unless the AU crew is planning to do anything special Thursday night. (There’s been talk of HackMaster and I wouldn’t mind playing some more Bang and/or mega-ultra-Carcassonne — I’m thinking about adding another set.) For once there won’t be any digital radiography stuff hanging over my head; got it all taken care of on the last trip.

A neat site I found via MeFi: One Sentence. It’s like a more readable version of grouphug.us, or Twitter-meets-PostSecret if you’re not familiar with the former.

Worked out 10/3, 10/5, 10/7. (Didn’t do upper body on 10/5, right arm was hurt.)

Some imageboard gems to make up for my absence:

Today we had lunch at the Suchada’s Thai Cuisine. I had the pork Pad Thai; extremely generous portions, pretty spicy, but no egg or lime wedges. We also had a cold summer roll appetizer with peanut sauce. They were good, but not as good as the ones we had at Pho Hoang’s in Federal Way.

After that we went to ShopKo and got Mario Strikers Charged (Wii), a second Nerf Maverick, 30 extra darts, and Jenga (I got hooked playing it at AU — had to get my own set). Of course, when we got home, a massive Nerf battle ensued. It was awesome. Like Hot Fuzz, but with foam and suction cups. I really like the new Maverick colors. The arsenal:

Mario Strikers Charged is kinda like Super Monkey Ball soccer, but with better controls and more features. Jones got it for his Wii a while back but I got the impression from his comments that it was just “okay.” (Maybe that was his well-known tendency for understatement at work.) Personally, I think it’s fantastic. I played through the lessons, won the Fire Cup, did best-of-three against someone named “sparky” via the WiFi connection, and, after running back to ShopKo for a second Nunchuk attachment, played a few games against Brett. (He won them all, but the margins were thin). BTW, if anyone wants to go head-to-head with me in MSC, my friend code is 090306 573436.

(If you’re not into Greg Egan or Transhuman Space, skip this section.) I was flipping through Axiomatic a couple days ago and came across this passage about uploading that I really liked. It’s not germane to anything in this post, but I wanted to share it anyway:

The argument was so familiar that I could run through it all in my head, without even waking her.
LORAINE: I don’t want to be imitated by a computer after I’m dead. What use would that be to me?
DAVID: Don’t knock imitation — life consists of imitation. Every organ in your body is constantly being rebuilt in its own image. Every cell that divides is dying and replacing itself with imposters. Your body doesn’t contain a single atom you were born with — so what gives you your identity? It’s a pattern of information, not a physical thing. And if a computer started imitating your body — instead of your body imitating itself — the only real difference would be that the computer would make fewer mistakes.

It’s funny how the best arguments for uploading are usually also arguments for nihilism… most of them, if you dig down a bit, seem to go: “Nothing has inherent value (or really matters anyway) so why not do what’s easy and comfortable?” I don’t like that. There must be some way to reconcile a (personal) pro-uploading stance with the belief that life has value.

Anyway. Sean, my oldest friend, is going to be in Pullman this weekend — we’ll have to get him to play some MSC.

Worked out 10/1.

Okay, first some food pics that were on my camera from last week:

On the left, vegetarian stroganoff with buffalo wings. Not a natural combination, but it’s what I was in the mood for. On the right, some of the best American trailer park cuisine available — Cheeseburger Macaroni Hamburger Helper. Good stuff.

Man, I love autumn. It’s nice and chilly outside (53°F) and just a little bit damp. My ideal weather. Finally, I can wear my favorite hoodie and drink hot tea comfortably again (I’m having oolong right now). ‘Course, Pasco’s not really there yet. But Pullman’s nice.

My contract with DreamHost will be up in about a week. I dunno if I’m going to stay with them. My site’s uptime has been lousy for the past four or five months (hovering around 96.7%, according to Pingdom) and despite my frequent complaints to the support staff, nothing’s been done to fix the server I was on. I’d say, “My site’s down again. This is a recurring problem, check my previous support tickets.” And they’d reply, “I restarted the server. We’ll look into it.” But nothing changed. Here’s a quick snapshot of the stats from last week (which was better than usual), omitting the 30th since that downtime actually had a legitimate cause:

Pathetic, right? Anyway, on Sunday I talked to one tech that admitted virgil (my old server) has been “plagued with problems” (his words) and said I’d probably see better performance on another server. So now my six domains have been moved to abbazaba. Hopefully it’s more stable.

Some pics from game night at Adventures Underground:

Lotta fun. We played Jenga, Bang! (which, aside from the crazy Italian picto-algebra, is pretty fun), Scrabble, Carcassonne (two base sets plus the Princess and the Dragon expansion), and Super Munchkin.

Last week’s Family Guy premiere (an hour-long Star Wars Episode IV parody) was awesome with a few exceptions. Like, I have to agree with this /co/mmenter’s sentiment:

It’s nice having TV back. The Office season premiere was awesome. Can’t wait for 30 Rock and South Park this week.

Oh yeah, I have a new rule for my blogroll: If you can’t post at least once every two months, you’re off the list.

I’ve been meaning to blog, but it’s easier to put off when I’m on my laptop. I was in the Tri-Cities for five days. Payroll, Metron patches, print server, yadda yadda. Got back last night. Got a bunch of comics while I was over there — KoDT #119-125, Walking Dead vol. 7, some 100 Bullets TPBs (it gets much better in vol. 2), The Goon vol. 2-4, and some miscellaneous stuff (Wormwood, Albion, various zombie comics).

I’ll make a more detailed post later on, but for now I’ll just note that: (a) Thursday night’s gaming at AU was the most fun I’ve had in a long time, (b) Jonathan Coulton’s Creepy Doll is an awesome song, and (c) LeBron James really stunk up the SNL season premiere.

Edit: Worked out 9/23.

You’ve probably heard about that MIT student that got arrested at the airport for wearing a “device” on her sweatshirt. Here’s a picture of the thing:

I’m amazed at the number of people (especially on Slashdot) deriding the police for how they responded. I mean, the girl comes to the airport with some obviously-homemade electronics pinned to her chest and, when questioned by airport staff, just walks away… Rudeness aside, how could she think that’s okay? It almost seems like this was something she did intentionally to get attention; maybe she thought this was a good way to point out how ridiculous airport security has become. (BTW, anyone notice the design on her hoodie? It’s a stick-figure person running around on fire. Kinda makes one wonder if there’s a logo for suicide bombers…)

Not the greatest week for my generation… first the “Don’t tase me, bro!” guy, now this.

Anyway, here’s what I made for lunch yesterday: Spaghetti alfredo with steak. (Had to use up those petite sirloin leftovers.)

Ordered a couple used books that I’m looking forward to reading: The Dark Side of the Sun, and Permutation City. (For the longest time I couldn’t find a copy of the latter selling for less than $35 and suddenly multiple copies are springing up on Amazon and eBay for $8.50. Wonder what happened?)

Hey, didja see the new VG Cats? Love the Sliders reference! With the classic cast, even (see? Prof. Arturo’s there). Keen.

My mafia game ended yesterday. Turns out we lynched the wrong guy. But in our defense, he was being a major twit (kept threatening to quit and get replaced, which makes discussion nearly impossible) and only role-claimed in response to another player doing the same. Plus Per and somestrangeflea (the mafia members in Newbie 432) really did work some amazing strategy on us. By putting each other to lynch -1 on day 2, they made sure the survivor would look awfully innocent. Very clever.

Hum, what else? Finally got my GeForce 7900 GS in the mail. Installed it with no problems, works great. Took the opportunity to blow all the dust out of my case. Oh, also, downloaded GURPS Spaceships from e23 (just came out yesterday). I’m actually not all that impressed with it; it’s too granular, IMO. Does seem like it’ll make space combat easier though.

Worked out 9/21. Want to see Resident Evil: Extinction sometime soon.

I’m about to head over to the gym, but I wanted to blog this evening’s meal first. Tonight we had petite sirloin steaks ($3.99/lb. at IGA), cottage cheese, salad (see the salad, mom?), and garlic bread. I cooked these steaks with Jaden’s “massive salting” technique, which I found through reddit (via popurls).

(Tangent: Un-capitalized proper names annoy me. They’re too easy to “read over” and I worry that someone will see them and think I don’t proofread. Hence the “PopURLs” title in the sidebar.)

The technique really does improve the taste and texture of the meat, but I think it makes it hard to get good color on the exterior. And she’s right about it not working on smaller cuts; I also grilled two smaller sirloins (~3.5-4 oz. maybe) that received this treatment and they didn’t turn out as nicely. But look at the cross section of that larger steak (pic on right)… Yum.

Before dinner we had some slices of Golden Delicious apple with cheese curds. They went together surprisingly well.

Great Top Chef episode tonight — Hung won the elimination challenge (I thought Brian deserved it a little more) and they finally kicked Sara off (good riddance). Is it just me, or was she playing up the “I’m Jamaican” angle a whole lot more in this one? I swear her accent got way thicker in this episode. The next two episodes will be the finale. Hung’s the obvious favorite, but I really hope Casey wins. Her ideas and presentation have been consistently awesome since the first week. The only person in the final four that I’d absolutely hate to see win is Dale. Also, yay for Gail coming back. I’m so sick of Padma and Colicchio — Gail Simmons and Ted Allen are the only semi-regular judges whose opinions I trust.

Some quick links before I take off:

• Alphonso Ribeiro selling breakdancing instructions in 1985.
• The same guy, several years later, doing funny dances on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as Carlton Banks.
• The hilarious Evolution of Dance by comedian Judson Laipply.