Timmerov's Blog
observations
mix up a batch of cookie dough. but nuke the butter so it's quite warm. this'll make the dough nice and runny. don't add the chocolate chips. instead, use the biggest chips you can find to scoop up the melted dough. cookie dough is chocolate chip dip.
pot
one of the arguments against legalizing pot goes something like this. yeah we know that other socially acceptable drugs are way more destructive. like alcohol and tobacco. but that's only the numbers part of the whole picture. communities in need can just be devastated by marijuana. therefore we have a moral obligation to aid them. get their lives straightened out. by criminalizing their vices. that's right. we help poor people by putting them jail.
pi box
it's a family tradition to go to joe and mary's for thanksgiving. the beautiful and talented alisa used to host thanksgiving. but now there is school and two birthdays. so joe and mary are the heroes. usually pie is requested. many pies. alisa makes incredibly yummy pies. i made a special pie box to safely transport four pies the 135 miles between their house and ours. this year the pie box was filled with a mexican chocolate meringue pie. i don't know what that yet, but the chocolate glaze is amazingly good. i "accidently" stuck my fingers in it when i was loading the pie box. there are two pumpkin pies with cookie cutter dough acorns and leaves for decorations. and there's the one on the bottom that i'm hoping we don't get to until everyone is really stuffed. it's apple and olala berrie with a crumbly top. oah, it just like something you'd start feuds for.
jury duty
so i got one of those scary official looking documents informing me i'm going to be on a jury the week of thanksgiving. heh. i promptly forgot about it until that monday. fortunately, i was in group 710. my instructions were always the same. check back in 4 hours. every 4 hours until the week ended on wednesday. don't know why people complain about doing their civic duty. seem to be easy as pie.
opengl fonts
opengl is a library of graphics primitives. it usually hooks fairly directly into the hardware. so it's pretty fast. and reasonably platform independent. it's pretty low level. so it often feels not much different from poking codes into magic hardware registers. but it's pretty darn cool. my big gripe: no font supports. want to draw a complex scene with aliens battling robots on a fractal landscape with two suns? no problem. but if you want to print "hello world" then you're out of luck. you pretty much have to roll your own. or grab something from the internet. which might be an okay starting point. but in the end, you're gonna roll your own.
very ants
october was one of the coldest recorded months in the united states. presumably since thermometers were invented and people started keeping records some 150 years ago. simultaneously, 2009 is likely to be one of the warmest years on record for the entire world. that kind of thing happens when there's lots of variance. from place to place. from year to year. if you think that's some sort of obvious contradiction nonsense, or you think that's some sort of proof that global warming is or isn't happening, you should probably stay out of the whole discussion. including when you go to the polls and vote.
recipe
i'm not a good cook. a long time ago a prepared this meal i called heap. it was a bunch of breakfast foods scrambled together. bacon eggs potatoes and toast. it was uh... novel. fortunately, the beautiful and talented alisa married me anyway. so it was with great surprise that she asked me to make heap for the family for dinner. oh dear. i must be pulling less weight than i thought. we had left over corned beef. that went in. one piece of shredded bread. two eggs. a splash of milk. season to taste. mix with a fork. fry in a pan. on the other burner i made mac-n-cheese for the boys. was pretty sure they wouldn't eat heap. which turned out pretty good.
b-day
b's birthday was last weekend. he's like me. doesn't much care for parties. he didn't want one. aunt julie came over on thursday for carrot cake birthday cake. happens to also be my favorite. he failed to blow out all 11 candles in one breath. twice. saturday afternoon he went to a friend's birthday party. saturday night we went to youth theatre production of annie. sunday i threw him a surprise dnd game. joe and mary and the girls came over for a table top game. mary politely disappeared and took care of all the visiting of locals so joe wouldn't have to. the beautiful and talented alisa whipped up a lasagna, coffee cake, and seconds and thirds of broccoli. which just tickled her pink. a good time was had by all.
stats
global warming stopped. it's true. i read it on the internet. if you fit a line to temperatures from 1999 to 2008 it's flat. no warming. crisis is over. skeptics won. neener neener. go buy an suv. heh. funny thing though. if you do the same thing for a 9 year window, or an 11 year window, instead of a 10 year window, you get a line with a positive slope. ie a warming trend. a small warming trend. why? turns out that 1999 was exceptionally hot. anomalies happen. it's a mistake to make predictions without taking them into account. if we look at the 10 year window that ends in 1999, we find a very steep upward trend. it's just as much a mistake to go all chicken little in 2000 based on that flawed analysis as it is to go all head in the sand about this recent flawed analysis. junk science. both sides. get over it. or we'll all lose.
bush lovers
it's kinda funny. some folks who a few years ago i would have put squarely in the bush lover camp suddenly profess they had never been very fond of him. wtf? am i not remembering things correctly? nope. a quick review of their blog shows i'm not crazy. they have clearly flip flopped. well. better late than never i suppose. any hope for some sort of bipartisan thing to say maybe get the us government's finances in order? heh. nope. seems their strategy is i'm evil. anything i support is evil. therefore anything i oppose is good. ta da! perverse. man i wish something could be done about people too stupid or too stubborn to think for themselves. maybe we could crash the economy and let em go hungry. hmm...
evil spawn
why that little son of a gun turkey bugger. everyone gets to pick their birthday meal. b picked stromboli. that's one of the very few dishes i make. the beautiful and talented alisa was kinda hurt that he didn't pick one of her specialties. she was letting him have it with both barrels. he explained, you've been doing all the cooking recently. dad hasn't even done the once a week meal he used to do. it's clearly his turn to cook. the conniving bastage. i swear i have no idea where he gets it.
bow
folks are giving obama a hard time about bowing to other foreign leaders. there's a bunch of ways to spin this. here are some of the more interesting ones. obama is as at least as stupid as bush. maybe even stupider. heh. he's the most powerful man in the world. he can redefine protocol at will. hrm. he's expressing the us's new position in the world. ie previous presidents squandered us prestige on stupid shit. in order to get that respect back we have to show respect. hurm. he's a black man at the top of what is effectively a white man's world. this bowing behavior might be part of the strategy that put him where he is. dunno. take your pick. ask him.
religious mates
some research was published recently. an extreme interpretation of the results is that religion is a mating strategy. rational measured interpretations are boring and don't steer eyeballs to your site like the sensational stuff. so onward we plow. the thinking goes like this. you're a male with a mate. a higher ranking male shows up and starts putting the moves on your female. you can't kick his ass cause if you could he wouldn't be higher rank than you. but you can't let him knock up your mate. so what do you do? play the god card. adultery is a sin. punishable by stoning. to death. you are effectively saying to your mate, if you fuck him i'll kill you. the male gets the message, too. you can't kill him. but you can kill his unborn children.
ceiling
the beautiful and talented alisa is slowly removing the acoustic popcorn cheese from the ceilings of the entire house. scraping it off is the easy part. then she has to apply new mud. texture it. prime it. paint it. it looks much nicer now. not like a cave with nitrates growing on the ceiling. she's done an amazing job of keeping the mess to a minimum. i was really expecting to find fine white dust absolutely everywhere. it sure would have been everywhere if i was doing this project. go alisa go!
6box
b and i have been 6boxing ddo. usually people 2box. that means they run two characters at once. usually on different computers. though it works pretty well with one beefy box. i run the main on my laptop. and the other 5 in a single vm on my desktop computer. i get like 20 fps in dungeons and 5 fps in town. the wizard finally hit 5th level. haste! yay! that makes things so much nicer. i kinda like scouring dungeons. it takes a lot of time. and most other players don't want to do the side quests. there's no follow command. so each toon needs to be manually driven from point a to point b. the party is pretty well balanced. we don't have a ranger. will probably correct that after we unlock 32 point buys. we've been gathering up all the collectibles and turning them in. we haven't bought anything. our best weapon is a +2 cold iron returning axe. everything else is +1. at 5th level a normal twink would be using +3 stuff and loaded with clickies and buff items. it's not completely free. but it's free enough. i'm thinking of setting up a business that rents toons for people to 2box with. need a rogue? need a cleric? here ya go. have fun storming the castle. i'm gonna be so rich.
dollhouse
i watched most of the first season of dollhouse. except i missed the very first episode. so i put it in our netflix queue. it finally percolated to the top. i watched it with the beautiful and talented alisa. at one point she commented that that dress does not cover her bottom. i just kinda stared at her like i'd stare at an alien being that just arrived on earth. um, darling. that would be the point of the show.
iphonlive
we so rock.
link
weight
my weight's been pretty steady for a long time. it does a sort of brownian motion random walk between 192 and 198. the pounds don't just sit there though. they move around quite a bit. at least as measured by my belt. and the jiggliness of my backside. which feels incredibly gross to me. and gets me to the gym. where i fix things. the beautiful and talented alisa seems to have partially succumbed to some of the diseases the children have been bringing home. so i've been biking them to school. i do not have pedaling muscles. well. didn't. over 8 miles a day kinda makes an impact in a short amount of time. a certain lady has a certain firmness to certain parts of her self that are very pleasing to a certain "gentleman". you'll just have to take my word for that.
poligotry
a buddy of mine sometimes throws around the term lib'ral like white folks used the n-word fifty hundred years ago. i tend to agree with many of his political positions. but i'm really turned off by the presentation. it's so bad that i can't tell others he's right and they should do what he says. cause he comes across as such a political bigot. maybe he's doing it deliberately. cause he thinks it makes him cool. or because it's sensational. and folks gobble it up. sort of the ann coulter approach. course she's mostly disappeared from the most popular lists. thank gods.
kelo
some four years ago the supreme court ruled that the city really does have the right to take your home for any goddam reason it wants. heh. okay so that's a bit of spin. the plan sounded great. change this prime real estate from residential to commercial. build it up for the benefit of a major employer. get more taxes. everyone should be happy. except for the people that have been living on the water front property all their lives. and really didn't want to move. but had to. so the company has announced it's relocating its business. the land is condemned. vacant. and not producing any revenues. some folks are looking mighty foolish right now. justice is required to be blind. it's not required to be stupid.
