So I got into Google Wave a few days ago.... Any of you on there?  Talking to Eliza is getting old. ;)

(No, I don't have any invites yet.  I'm not sure I'm getting any since I was invited by someone and not by Google.)

I trust you can all figure out my username.

So I woke up this morning, and Secret Project Z was on the front page of Slashdot. Tuesday is sure going to be interesting at work!



(I don't actually code on it or anything, I just occasionally help digitize forms for our testbed clinics and provide some initial front-line support for them.)

Here are, verbatim, the instructions that came on the label of the acorn squash I purchased last week:

Toss whole squash into campfire embers for 3 hours. (Or chop in half with axe, remove seed, slather center with butter, bake in oven at 350°F for 45 min. or till soft. Flavour as desired, salt, pepper, bacon strips, or cheese. Quite a find after panning for gold all day!

If you haven't played a Monkey Island before, today is a good day to fix that.

One day a few months ago, the Outback that was in a shopping center relatively near us suddenly closed up shop. The renovations for the new tenant began shortly thereafter, and they finished...well, last week, apparently.

So tonight, Jerry and Helen and I went out for dinner... to the Lone Star Texas Grill.

And now I have some inkling of what it is like to see your country's pavilion at Epcot.

All the staff are dressed up in "Texan" outfits -- lots of cowboy shirts, a few people with boots, some poor guy in a bolo tie. They have a triangle they pull out to ring to let everyone in the restaurant know there's someone who's going to attempt their 72 oz. steak (this is apparently a Texan tradition, according to the menu .....I guess it's been around for a while at one restaurant that has "Texan" in the name?). The decor has lots of boots and cowboy hats and stars and longhorns and wagon wheels, as you might expect, as well as a giant light fixture shaped like a horseshoe, which... is relatively unexpected. They describe taquitos as "spring rolls" on the menu, and the queso is listed as "con queso", which...what?

But the most seriously brain-breaking thing there for someone actually from Texas? Especially for someone from Amarillo?

They have an item on the menu called Panhandle Tilapia.

So I'm making some hummus soon, and I decided to make chickpeas from dried, so I'm going to have a bunch more than I need for the recipe I'm using. So...

Anyone have any favorite recipes using chickpeas?

First: Evolution (the mail client for Gnome, which I was formerly using) has started eating my emails. I am now moving back to good old Claws.

So if you sent me something in the past little bit and unexpectedly not gotten a response, send me a poke. I haven't actually lost any mail -- it's still all up on Gmail, so I'm going to try to go through and see what I've been missing -- but it's possible something fell through the cracks.

Second: I am starting to see why people hate doing taxes, what with trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be withholding for a self-employed out-of-the-country income (I was a contractor at Secret Project X) when I've already paid the equivalent of SS and Medicare taxes which should count due to a tax treaty..... (I applied for the extension, so I'm not actually late yet.) This should be much easier next year, thankfully.

Third: I think I'm finally getting back my knitting mojo. I had been knitting a sock earlier this year, and it was going pretty slowly. And then I got to the heel! Finally, the interesting part! And then I realized I had the wrong number of stitches! And then I hated the sock and have not touched it since about late April.

What finally got my back to knitting was, oddly enough........ the NASCAR race. This makes sense. Really.

First off, it's a long drive there, and knitting is usually pretty good to do in the car since it's one of the few car activities I like that I can do and also pay some attention to what's going on and hold conversations with people.
Second, I figured I could probably do some knitting at the race (especially if it turned out that I found the whole thing utterly boring).

So what was the exciting knitting project I decided to start for the Michigan race? Why, a lace shawl, of course. ;)

I'm still only a few repeats into it (I got a grand total of one repeat done on the Michigan trip), but I'm starting to feel like I'm getting some momentum going.

I saw a woodchuck today. How about you?

My favorite, ever since I started learning the language, is sacapuntas (pencil sharpener in Spanish), since it sounds so very much like it ought to be a swear.

I also really like the construction of pez and pescado; pez is a live fish, and pescado means literally "the fished" -- that is, what you eat.

Google Squared, the dadaist search engine.

Guster.
Toronto neighbourhoods.
Concert venues hamilton.

And even when most of the rows make sense, the columns are amusing. (Did you know that the Magic Kingdom is published by Capcom?)

So last week was Week One of my time here at Secret Project Z. It was... well, let me explain.

I apparently picked a very good time to start, as last week was Staff Appreciation Week. As previously mentioned, the very first thing I did on Monday was have breakfast. On Tuesday, there were massages. On Wednesday, there was lunch and random door prizes (I got a bottle of wine -- Jackson-Triggs, actually, which a) neat but b) I don't really *like* wine). On Thursday, there was coffee and donuts (Timmy's, naturally), and everyone got these really nice fleece pullovers. And on Friday, there was a wine and cheese tasting.


Sooooo. Yeah. I have to keep reminding myself that all this won't be happening every week.

Other than that, it's been kind of hurry up and wait. There are 4 main offices here (and people we support outside of there), and lots of people at all of them that I have to meet. My boss seems to be pretty constantly running all over the place, and I've only really gotten to see him for half an hour a day, so there's a lot of stuff I haven't gotten to go over (like, half the stuff I'm supposed to be supporting). So I get enormous infodumps and then I'm left to my own devices at my desk for the rest of the day.

Everyone has been really nice and friendly though. It's been neat. So far it seems like I've really lucked out. We'll see how that holds up!

Okay, this is pretty damn awesome. (It doesn't hurt that World of Goo's music is already pretty damn awesome.)

The things you find when wandering around the mp3 store on Amazon...
I had seen a link to a bunch of free sampler CDs from various indie labels, so I decided to peek around and see what else was free. There's the Apples in Stereo song from the Colbert/Decemberists shred-off episode. There are some random live GBS songs (off of their live CDs, nothing new afaik) that supposedly will be available at the end of the month. Which led me to see what GBS was available -- including a couple of songs that I hadn't ever seen before, two from an EP that I didn't know existed....

And one from a kid's album I've never heard of that includes this line in the preview:
"Sharks can play with penguins and become... special friends."

Yes. Special.

This is hilarious (BSG spoilers).
This is also pretty hilarious.

Not hilarious but real and awesome, Avatar wins a Peabody.

Dude. You guys. This is awesome, y/y?

Not that I normally care about this, but the design aspects are interesting here: Apple announced a new ipod shuffle today. Most of the discussion about it seems to be about how they've moved the controls off the shuffle itself and onto the earbuds. Which...okay, it doesn't bug me too much, but that's annoying for if they break or if you don't like the earbuds. I'm surprised people haven't started yelling about how they've changed the controls to ONLY HAVE ONE CONTROL BUTTON.

You can see the new control scheme here (go down to "Easy Access Controls" and click on the image). (ETA: Here's the official Apple documentation.)
You single click to play or pause a song. You double click to go forwards a song or triple click to go back a song. And if you hold down the button, it'll say the artist and track name. And if you hold down the button until you hear a tone, it'll cycle through your playlists.

Gee, it couldn't be simpler.

And somewhere in the future, a thousand people at the gym stab furiously at their goddamn piece of crap music players that don't fucking do what they want.

So the Washington Post keeps their own database of congressional votes.

And on it they offer a few headings to use to sort the vote totals. You've got by party (obviously), by state (duh), by region (slightly redundant, but okay), by boomer status (kind of random, but could potentially be telling on certain votes), by gender (sure)............... and by astrological sign.

o/~ one of these things is not like the others o/~

(This is old news, I guess, but I just noticed it today.)

Saturday Morning Watchmen

(Original entry: http://seasleepy.tumblr.com/post/83936075)

How to demonstrate you are completely unfamiliar with the source material: do a story revealing that Watchmen is unlikely to have a sequel.