Salutations, earthlings. I rarely take the time to appreciate amazing services that I take advantage of today. One such service, Akismet, allows me to serve up content free from comment spam and malware links.

In the last 4 months, Akismet has blocked 6,402 nasty comments from view, all without a single wasted minute of review or annoyance. But you’re probably saddened by what you’re missing.

Some of it is just goofy. I’d probably click on it if it wasn’t clearly designed for me to do so.

Affiliate

Do Asians throw hamburgers at their weddings since American’s throw rice at theirs?

Pandering to my ego is a fantastic way to get by my sensors, but Akismet doesn’t seem to have that vulnerability.

Singapore Man

I have been reading this blog for quite sometime now, and this is my first comment. I would like to tell you that I enjoy reading this blog, and that I love thought provoking articles like this! (Sounds pretty good, until you realize I was talking about the NuWave Oven. Chicken breast is many things, but not thought provoking.)

get rid of acne scars

You are soooo gifted in writing. God is truly utilizing you in miraculous ways. You’re doing a great job! This was an awesome weblog! (Yes, I think God is utilizing me, but I must confess I haven’t done enough to spread the gospel of acne scar removal)

Chethasse

I do think this is a most incredible website for proclaiming great wonders of Our God! (Again, you’re right. Unfortunately in this article about Information Assurance…I guess I don’t know who ‘Our God’ is. Bruce Scheier? Yeah, and I bet Chethasse is one of Bruce’s aliases, that jerk.)

To be honest, I’m rather shocked by how much “Our God” and “the Work of the Lord” I saw in the comments. It makes sense, I suppose, as more and more churches are creating websites, and there are even more ad-hoc blogs being set up by Christians and other religious groups. The cool thing, for hackers, is that these groups are usually motivated by the thought of “doing good” in the world and rarely have the technical expertise to manage patching or installing addons to block spam. Spammers can be pretty clever about picking the low-hanging fruit.

This is one of those seemingly simple concepts that never really gets elaborated. Usually a student learning Java for the first time is told. “Write the following:”
public class Person
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}
“Don’t ask why, just do it.” Because of that, I’ve heard this question more than a few times in the last couple years.
Read the rest of this entry »

My favorite professor, Dr. Bezrukov, used to have a very apt approach embed to those all-important, core elements in computer science to which there was no simple explanation: “I’m going to tell you how important it is that you should know this. Not only do you need to remember…it needs to be there in the center of your mind. If someone were to come into your room in the middle of the night, grab you, and shake you awake…you need to be shouting as you wake up.” This was an extraordinary way to help us realize how much he wanted us to learn this topic.

The first thing that my professor explained to me in just such a way was the structure of a Java class. I had never had any programming experience in my life, and Java was as foreign to me as Greek. But it didn’t take long for me to memorize “public static void main(String[] args){}”. I had no clue what any of it meant, but I shouted it when I was startled from my sleep. I also got used to typing it every time I started my homework in vim.

My most enjoyable memories in the computer science field were those “a-ha” moments when the simplest of concepts suddenly made complete sense, like Dr. Bezrukov’s “public static void main()”. I admit that I used to have one of these every week. I remember standing in the shower before an early morning of class and suddenly realizing how hot and cold water piping really worked and why it took time for water to warm up. This may seem silly to you, but it’s not something I had thought about before. I encourage everyone to have these moments as often as possible at every phase in life.

Tonight’s dinner was a nice quick meal of Curried Potatoes and Barbecue [Turkey] Ham (I’m trying to live a little healthier, after all). This was a bit of an experiment for me, as I’m not fully acclimated to using curry in my recipes, but I braved it for you, the reader. I do all this for you, and I get nothing in return.

The preparation is simple enough. 3 medium, Yukon gold tomatoes (I’m sure the recipe would work fine with russets or other kinds) and 1 medium onion, both chopped broadly. Come to think of it, I don’t think I know another way to say “chopped into big pieces, kind of bit-sized but maybe a little bigger”. Anyway, spread these about the cooking pan.

Warm up a 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil with 1-2 tablespoons of butter. As you are beginning to see, I’m not a big fan of measuring things. Anyways, balance this out with a tablespoon-ish of curry powder and a hefty sprinkling of red pepper and some minced garlic. This is all relative to your taste! Add pepper if you want, I don’t care, I even threw in a pinch of cilantro. How you warm this up is your business, but since I don’t own a microwave I used a cereal bowl nestled in my rice cooker. Let me shatter your belief that decent cooks (and computer people) lead glamorous lives.

Drizzle this evenly over the potato/onion mix. Then start the process to cook this bad boy in an oven or, in my case, Nu-wave oven. Halfway through, stir it up and be sure the sauce coats the potatoes. I would recommend another peppering of curry powder, but I love the taste of curry. Once the potatoes are done, eat them! Bam, who’s amazing? You are.

Look, I could give you more to work with, but I hate recipes. Even when I follow one I tend to drift off halfway through and add my own personality to it. I’ll grant you I’ve never made a souffle, but I’ve never had a bad time while cooking. Let me know if you found a way to better this recipe.

Bonus – BBQ Ham: Easy, precooked ham, cubed, dropped in a bowl of hickory bbq sauce, thrown on the grill rack and warmed up in the oven. Easy to do, and life is simple.

When I sat in my Software Engineering or management courses it always seemed like an interesting task to rally the troops and build a working software solution. In these courses we learned to identify talent and involve people with whatever skills they had in their arsenal. Successful and failed projects passed by; each one taught a lesson about coping with failure and harnessing success towards future efforts. Everything was a process to accomplish a common goal: teams were given a task, chose an approach and learned how to squeeze all the talent they could into a solid attempt at the solution. All of these trials seemed to be finely tuning muscles to be called on in any team situation and bring out the best solutions. Entering the workforce has quickly shown where I’ve developed strong muscles in some wrong areas, and I find myself aggressively pursuing a figure skating gold with legs trained for speed-skating.

The problem that I face most frequently Read the rest of this entry »

If you found this site via some sort of Google search, you’re probably looking for answers. I won’t get to that now, but I will warn you that I don’t have them. If you’re a friend or colleague of mine you will have let out at bit of a laugh and settled into your chair with every intent of hating what I’m about to write. Well, I’m glad.

In industrial technology applications we often see projects and ideas labelled with ideas that spark value to other techies.  Terms like ‘robust”, ‘quality’, ‘efficient’, and, to a lesser degree, ‘boffo’. Far less often do we see technology simply described in terms of ease of use.  In fact, I would say it’s downright rare to hear of any steam-powered, hard-left engineers bringing up usability or learning curve when drafting a system designs or applications. Just like football players are interested in beer chugging and cheerleaders, I guess engineers into database normalization and load-balancers.

So what happens when you take that out of the equation? What happens when you take away the pomp and circumstance, when you lose the beer and the cheerleaders? Well, then you have football  or,  in this case, engineering. Take away the sex appeal of massive, scalable availability and mind-boggling complexity; what are you left with? It’s not frequent, sure, but it happens eventually. You’ve got problem solving, pure and simple. Simple calculations, exercises, tasks, and duties.  Sometimes football players have practice, they run drills, lift weights, and sell pizza coupons. Well it’s no different for engineers.

Enter Microsoft Access.

I’m serious, although this is quite a leap (move with me here, I’m trying to keep this short). Access has never, in its entire existence as a RDBMS, won any championship football games, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great tool. It’s the football practice dummy and the barbell and the coupon book, but all of this for engineers. Just like them, we’ve got to do the boss’ laundry and earn our keep. We architect the big solutions, sure, but what about the little stuff? What about the parts inventory for the warehouse? What about the customer contact that the boss does once a week and notes in his journal? There’s also that email list that you share information on, but people keep asking the same questions every year or so and nobody keeps any of the information recorded anywhere? What about office supply orders that Debbie does once a week? It’s all little stuff.

Three times, in three different positions, I’ve used Access (or other simple data management tools) to bridge a gap or improve a process that was being done poorly or not-at-all.  Each of these times it’s been a task that I volunteered for, and each time I’ve received more recognition than all of my ‘big picture’ work combined. I didn’t choose Access because it’s fast or robust or sexy (as it is clearly none of these things), but it is definitely quick and easy and portable, not to mention the availability across most corporate IT spaces. It’s not designed to track Walmart’s inventory, but it does get the job done.  After all, who cares about an 18% performance increase on the security log queries when I have this nifty iPhone app that lets me keep track of what I eat every day? Okay, maybe that’s silly, but it’s all little stuff. And the reason it makes a difference is because it effects people.

I’m a proud Access developer. It’s not my day job, and I’m glad for that, but it’s an amazing tool. I pledge to volunteer my services to help improve the processes and daily work of people on whom I rely. I’m also going to use it as a ‘gateway database’; I’ll use it to get into American homes and get kids and adults to try harder stuff like MySQL, Linq, Rails, and Hibernate. But for Dad’s big list of home electronic serial numbers, Timmy’s baseball card collection, and small project CRM…well, I’m on board. Who knows? Maybe even the Microsoft or the EPA will use it.

*Remember: a good developer is an active developer. Please stop engineering for engineering’s sake; it’s not healthy. Put your skills to some good use and fix something or teach someone (or vice-versa).

As usual, my first stop is always Amazon. They seem to have pretty solid, just-under-retail pricing scheme. They’ve been my number one online source for online purchases for the last five years. In this case, the price seemed incredibly high: $211!! That’s just over $40 dollars per season, which was more than what I would expect any  individual season to cost. I’m not buying diamonds, people.

To verify this I added all of the individual seasons together, again priced at Amazon.   The result? $202.  This was disheartening. You could basically get a 5% discount by buying each item individually, but it’s not impressive enough to be anything more than  a blip. Something is wrong at Amazon, and I don’t like it. While I love Babylon 5, there’s got to be a better way.

At this point I checked eBay and put in a few bids. Most sets seemed to be going for anywhere between $90 and $140. This is 50% cheaper than the Amazon prices, but you’ve got to take your chances with the unknown sellers of the massive, online-sales supergiant.  I was further restricted from this option by my terrible bidding skills;  I kept losing every bid.

Returning to the world I love of higher prices with no bidding skill required, I decided to check Buy.com to see what they had in store for me.  I’ve been using this site on and off when Amazon’s prices border on the insane. The full series of Babylon 5 is available for $153 with shipping!!! How can this be? This price is 25% lower than the Amazon options.  At $30 per season we’re almost in business. It’s still quite the investment, but we’re talking about one of the best sci-fi shows of all time.

The last test was to see if the blip in Amazon’s pricing also applied to here.  Individual pricing of the seasons was $20 per season resulting in a flat $100 for all 5 seasons of B5. This cost is less than 50% of the Amazon prices, and 30% less than Buy.com complete set. The best news is how comparable the Buy.com price is to eBay listings without any of the hassle or dangers of bidding sales. If you haven’t noticed, I hate bidding on things. It makes me feel so…..dirty.

BONUS:

The Amazon Video Store is asking $2 per episode with discounts bringing the 20-something-episode seasons down to between $36 and $38. This puts their Video on Demand price for the full series at about $185. I’m a big fan of streaming video (Hulu, Netflix, and the Roku), but this price seems outrageous to me.  The distribution costs of the electronic versions are drastically lower than physical discs. While there will be continuing maintenance/bandwidth costs for electronic distribution, it’s completely absurd to think that this market will be successful without drastically reduced prices. I think Amazon is basing their VoD pricing on iTunes’ Store and Amazon’s own cloud services. It doesn’t make any sense to the end consumer right now to be spending this much on intangible product. Even if they see profit margin reduction in these early days it seems like they couldn’t afford the long term cost of losing any potential consumer base to Netflix, Blockbuster, and other video services.

I’ve been telling people for a while that “Maryland is my second-least favorite state, right after Texas”. Now, that’s a bit inflammatory, especially for me, but it got me to thinking about how I really do think about our great union.

The following list is an list our United States of America, ranked in an arbitrary order based on my preference.  I suppose the ranking comes from personal experience and marvel that I’ve built up over my few years on this planet.  It’s probably not even that accurate, it’s just my first pass.

1. Minnesota
2. Michigan
3. Colorado
4. Washington
5. Montana
6. Maine
7. Alaska
8. Idaho
9. New York
10. Georgia
11. Vermont
12. Virginia
13. Pennsylvania
14. Massachussets
15. California
16. New Mexico
17. Ohio
18. Arkansas
19. Oregon
20. Conneticut
21. Oklahoma
22. North Dakota
23. Kansas
24. Utah
25. Wisconsin
26. New Hampshire
27. Illinois
28. Indiana
29. North Carolina
30. Arizona
31. Iowa
32. West Virginia
33. Rhode Island
34. Wyoming
35. Nebraska
36. Tennessee
37. New Jersey
38. Delaware
39. Missouri
40. South Dakota
41. Kentucky
42. Hawaii
43. South Carolina
44. Louisiana
45. Nevada
46. Florida
47. Maryland
48. Mississippi
49. Alabama
50. Texas

Well, it turns out I was wrong about Maryland, and I’m definitely not sure about 1 and 50.  I’ll let you know if it changes, maybe it’ll be a series on this blog (under the category ‘state preference’).

What I’ve learned from all of this is that I don’t really dislike any state in this union. I’m a big fan of our country, and our planet too.  I used to be very bombastic about this kind of thing, but I think I’ve mellowed out. Let me know if you think I’m waaaay off, and I’m sure you do, but I’d really love to see your ordered list of the states.

Thanksgiving Break is a beautiful thing, but not perfect. I think there’s a very accurate expression “If you need something done, ask the busiest person.” This comes with the corollary: “A person with much to do will always sabotage themselves when confronted with plenty of time to do it.”  Well, we’re coming up on finals week with plenty of projects to work on…soooo.

First was a simple mix of potatoes, onions, corn, and ground round. I mixed a bit with rice for the first go-around, then cooked it overnight in beef broth. The result of which I showed in the picture.

Second, thrice cooked chicken (boiled, grilled, and pan fried[olive oil and lots of minced garlic]) in rigatoni. I overcooked the noodles a bit, as you can see in the picture, but it was truly delicious with plenty of basil, grape tomatoes, parsley, and Parmesan cheese.

I’d love to hear/see about easy dishes that you guys like to whip up.  For now I’ll put my nose to the grindstone and hope to improve my productivity.

I’ve been running silent lately. Most of this is due to the fact that I’m stretched a little too far. What I have had lately is a lot more time to be in my apartment (working or otherwise) to enjoy the joys of cooking. While I usually just throw together sandwiches or spartan pastas, now and again I get to cook up something fun. Usually this involves the NuWave Oven that I reviewed a while back (thanks again S & H).  I threw together a gallery of the ones I remembered to photograph.

The first and second was some chicken I made for my first attempt at a Chicken Tikka Masala. The chicken was rubbed in butter, onions, cayenne and ginger.  The dish went over fairly well with my parents, but it was pretty far from any Masala’s I’ve had.  Next time I’ll remember to buy the right ingredients and follow a recipe. Oh, the third picture was the same sauce and chicken (lots of leftovers) over rice.

The fourth and fifth pictures are Parmesan Potatoes (I guess that’s the best name I could come up with). Three potatoes spiced with parsley, rosemary, thyme and basil and cooked in butter and olive oil. Near the end of the cooking I threw on some grated Parmesan cheese I had sitting around.

The last pictures are from today’s lunch/dinner: HabaHoneyBQ Chicken (they’re getting worse). I had some Habanero Honey left from my trip to Colorado (courtesy of a little candy shop in Monument) which I mixed with barbecue sauce to coat the chicken. I baked for about 15 minutes on one side and 10 on the other.  The result was a deliciously charred, sweet taste.  Unfortunately  some of it was a bit tough, the reason for which I finally realized: using partially frozen chicken breasts. Unless you chop all of the chicken into similarly sized pieces the NuWave tends to overcook the smaller ones.  From now on I get uniform cuts or, preferably, allow my chicken plenty of time to thaw.

Anyways, the dish was partnered with some rice pilaf with corn and dusted with cilantro.  It’s been very tasty, but I’m not a master yet. I’ll stay vigilant and keep you updated. I’m excited to graduate and settle into a real apartment with a decent kitchen. I promise my posts will improve.

Happy Saturday.