Cavity search
April 02, 2009 // Link
My dentist has the world’s tiniest hygienist. Like one of those birds who clean hippo teeth. I keep expecting her to crawl right in.
Yes means hell yes
April 03, 2009 // Link
Babysitting my nephew tonight, which means playing PS3 games and eating junk food until 3 AM. Of course, he’ll probably be asleep by midnight.
Irresponsible uncles FTW!
Yawn
April 05, 2009 // Link
404 Caffeine not found.
MacHeisted
April 06, 2009 // Link
I just whored out my Twitter feed to get a free copy of Delicious Library. Everyone has a price, and it turns out mine is 40 bucks.
Brr
April 06, 2009 // Link
Yesterday was so sunny and warm I brought my Vespa out of storage. This morning it was covered in snow. As Twitter would put it: #SpringFail.
The brr continues
April 07, 2009 // Link
Had to scrape ice off my car this morning. What’s that old expression, “cold hands, warm seething frustration”? Something like that.
Speaking of the chill outside, KISS is doing a fan directed tour and will be going to whatever cities get the most votes. I think it’s time for a “Send KISS to Antarctica!” campaign.
I dig those nurses’ uniforms, though
April 08, 2009 // Link
I’m sitting in a hospital waiting room, picking up a friend. She’s fine, but gosh I hate how hospitals smell and feel. They give me the screaming heebie-jeebies.
Rogers. It’s still a verb.
April 09, 2009 // Link
I called Rogers today to add 1 item to my home services, and to remove 1 other item.
Adding a service was easy and immediate. It took30+ minutes, and talking with THREE sales reps, to remove a service. What a shamefully ignorant way to treat customers.
“Rogers: we’re not happy, until you’re not happy.”
Someday
April 09, 2009 // Link
You know all those things you keep telling yourself you’ll do someday? Like go to Paris, clean out the attic, or learn to sew? Well, Someday isn’t a day of the week.
I think we should do something about that.
I think the extra day in a leap year, February 29, should be called Someday.
Consider it a holiday from procrastination. Instead of taking the day off from work, you’d be taking the day off from putting things off.
I bet there’s something you’ve always told yourself you’ll do “someday.” If you haven’t done it by the next February 29, I say you give yourself a Someday and do it.
I’m putting it in my calendar right now. All day event, repeats semi-semi-annually. Who’s with me?
Tweenbots
April 14, 2009 // Link
Tweenbots are adorable little robots that rely on strangers to help them get to a destination. Great idea, great design. If they catch on, I’m going to start using a little flag on a hat to get myself home from pubs.
Pro tip
April 15, 2009 // Link
If, at any point, I have to say the phrase “all one word” when telling you my email address, then you should probably stick by your fax machine.
London
April 15, 2009 // Link
Hey, I’m in London!
Drat, it’s the other London.
Oh well. I’m awash with pleasant nostalgia as I visit my first undergrad university. Hey look: there’s that place I was sober that time!
First Vespa ride of the season
April 19, 2009 // Link
Beautiful day for the first Vespa ride of the season. Choosing fun over looking cool FTW!
You know, lately I’d been worried I’ll mix up FTW and WTF when I type quickly. Then I started to have a new, carefree attitude since I’ve just started typing FTF...right up until I realized what it’d mean.
Alice in Wonderland Topsy-Turvy Cake
April 20, 2009 // Link
I forgot to blog about the topsy-turvy cake I made. Whoops.
The cake was for Lisa, the sister of a very good friend of mine. She’s taking a funeral director course, and her latest assignment was to conduct a mock service for a fictional character. She selected Alice in Wonderland, and I volunteered to supply an appropriately angular desert.
Yes, I was going to bake a cake for a fake wake.
It was my first attempt at something like this, and while it didn’t turn out quite the way I’d planned it also wasn’t a total disaster. Carrington: 1, Mischievous Cake Gremlins: 0. Go team!
I started by baking 6 cake platters, thinking that would be plenty. It turned out to be plenty and a half, or roughly one metric plenty here in Canada. Here are 3 of the 6 platters, and as far as you know I’m not lying about the other 3:
Notice the bull’s eyes? That’s from using little plastic rings set into the cake pan and making two batches of batter (a chocolate batch, and a not so chocolate batch that I’ll charitably call vanilla). When you stack them in alternating layers, cutting into the cake reveals a checkerboard pattern (I learned this from my pal Rachel, who has oodles of bakin’ and cookin’ smarts). I leave it as a mental exercise for the reader to imagine the checkerboard. Feel free to use diagrams where necessary, and show all work.
The 6 (as far as you know) platters then were popped into the freezer overnight, because baking 6 (as far as you know) cakes is quite enough work for one evening. Plus, there were probably video games that just needed playing.
The next day, I made two stacks of 3 platters (3 + 3 = 6, as far as you know) along with a ridiculously large batch of frosting. I used the frosting to glue the stacks together, and then carved them into topsy-turvy shapes:
I worried that the top stack would just slide off, so I carved a little ledge into the bottom stack:
After all this carving, I found that I was throwing away more than half the cake I’d baked. Topsy-turvy cakes are incredibly wasteful designs:
I then frosted the individual stacks, but didn’t put one on top of the other yet. I also may have eaten a large amount of the cut off cake and watched a downloaded episode of The Omid Djalili Show, but I can neither confirm nor deny such speculation at this time.
I rolled the fondant as thin as I could get it, but it was still probably too thick because the weight of it nearly crushed the platters. I probably should use some sort of pound cake if I make another one of these some day.
I could actually see the cakes slowly shrinking under the weight of the fondant, although that may have just been because I was running out of time and frantically smoothing it with a combination of smacks and holds right out of a 1970’s kung fu movie. Specifically, Five Deadly Venoms. (I used Scorpion style, in case you were wondering.)
I stacked the frosting-and-fondant covered platters, and started carving little fondant designs to decorate the cake. By this point I was already late (darn you, The Omid Djalili Show, you were distracting) so I was rushing fairly frantically. I switched to Centipede style, and I was victorious in battle:
My cake-fu is strong.
New Mac Pro video card
April 20, 2009 // Link
My Mac Pro’s replacement video card just arrived. Woo hoo! (That’s how us old people spell “w00t”).
The Mac’s original ATI x1900 had died the death of the overheated. Turns out, that’s not atypical with first gen Mac Pros if you work ‘em too hard it. And work ‘em hard is exactly what I do. Luckily the heat didn’t take out the motherboard.
Anyway, I removed the ATI card and inserted the new NVIDIA one and bing! the Mac “just worked”—no drivers to install, no fiddling to be done.
I’m now officially sporting an “insufferable Mac user” glow.
TequilaCon
April 23, 2009 // Link
TequilaCon is this Saturday!
TequilaCon is an annual gathering of bloggers and blog-friendly lads and lasses. It started back in 2005 in Chicago, and takes placed in a different city each year. This time ‘round it’s going down in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
This year is the fifth annual gathering, and it’ll be my first time attending. I can’t wait to meet Jenny and all the rest of the TequilaConners.
There will be drinks and temporary tattoos and swag and new friends and more drinks and heaps o’ fun exploring the Southwest.
Be there, or be a four-sided regular polygon with all sides equal and all internal angles 90 degrees!
TequilaCon and on and on
April 27, 2009 // Link
My first TequilaCon was heaps and heaps of fun. I met hilarious and fun people, I saw a city I’d never been to before, and I had a total blast start to finish.
I was late for the actual kick-off, because winding my way there via the backstreets of Santa Fe I met the coolest local family having a front yard BBQ. I stopped to chat and ask directions, and was “forced” to eat ribs. Ribs ribs and more ribs.
Once I finally made it to the Pink Adobe (which sounds like a euphemism but was actually the bar where TC was being held) I made my way up to the Dragon Room. I immediately fell in love with everyone there: huge laughs, great stories, and a fantastic atmosphere.
Of course best of all was finally getting to meet Jenny, who every sane guy has a crush on. Naturally I’m no exception.
The party moved from the Dragon Room and down the street to a new bar, where a gaggle of drunken TC09’ers found themselves singing along to the music of DJ El Gato. More laughs, more drinks, more great times.
They called it a night a little after 2:00, the lightweights, and I wandered home in a warm, clear, beautiful Southwestern evening under a billion stars.
The next morning I found myself energized and excited. Or maybe I was still drunk? In any case, I had a chance to rifle through my TequilaCon swag bag and see what goodies it contained:
Among the treats was some unidentifiable candy that looked like gum but tasted like gnu hide. Don’t ask how I know what gnu hide tastes like. Some things are best left for high school yearbook photos and my therapist.
I spent an amazing day wandering around Sante Fe, taking in local sights and sampling local gnosh (including the spiciest sandwich in the world: I’d ordered a “panini” but the waitress clearly thought I’d said “ham and cheese and lava and evil”).
I even got to scratch “New Mexico” off my goal of seeing a movie in every state:
It was a heck of a swell way to spend the weekend.