Am I sad?

I reserved a copy of Mario Kart Wii way back when no details about the game had even been announced aside from the fact that it was in developement. Since then so many good games have come out and I've had to pass many of them by. Do I need another game? No, but it was already paid for and I couldn't bear the idea of it going to someone who didn't reserve it 9 months ago. Then I get a call from Game Crazy stating there was a midnight launch. It had been completely off my radar until I saw a dig story early on Friday morning. That prompted me to check the release date (amazon listed next Tuesday). Game Crazy's message said the midnight launch was Saturday night/Sunday morning. I learned, during my escapades trying to get a copy of The Orange Box, that nearly everyone is really bad at getting launch dates for games correct so it's not that surprising. I just typed that I'm not the sort of person who goes to midnight launches or waits in lines for games but I had to erase it because it occured to me that I am. I wasn't planning to go to this midnight launch, however. It did occur to me, somewhere around 11:15, that Mrs. Whackly was taking the car tomorrow and I'd be home with the boy and no way to drive around. If I wanted to get the game I was going to have to go tonight. There was nobody there. The staff outnumbered the patrons. I chatted with them for a few minutes and there was a steady stream of people in and out but no line or rush or huddled masses yearning to play Mario Kart. I was worried that I'd missed a memo. Perhaps the game completely blows and nobody told me... or so I was thinking. Silly me; the game is cool. I haven't played enough to say it's badass or awesome or is the question answered only by the number 42. I did play online though, and that was cool. Finally, an online game for the Wii I can get behind (I could have gotten behind BWii online but I don't know anyone else who has it so I can't testify). This brings me to my point. 3866-8399-7170. Throw me your digits in an email or put them in the comments, please. kthxbai

Whackly fills out Afterglide's April 9th Madlib

Afterglide

The other day I took a giant shaver on this chick's whisker bisquit and when I finished I totally reverse donkey punched her in the pastrami sandwich. Oh fucknuts was she amazed! In fact, she was so amazed that she triple sow-cowed and shot smegma at my eyes from her saltwater clam colony. It stunned my system so much that I ran to the dook cellar and dropped a whopping pink-colored bung baby the consistency of rancid butter in the porcelain throat of Vishnu. God damn if I didn't Tatlin that fucking prayer catcher with my most rollicking duke nuke ever. It smelled like a transient that drank a bottle of Murphy's Oil Soap, rolled around in a pile of frog jizz and tea-bagged a pool of his own pus. All I know is I'm never eating at White Castle ever a-fucking-gain!

Alternate version

The other day I took a giant speckled poop trout on this chick's  uvula, and when I finished I totally pink socked her in the Oscar Meyer beef cotto salami. Oh Allah was she  irate! In fact, she was so irate that she donward facing dogged and shot fromunda cheese at my taint from her tear ducts. It stunned my system so much that I ran to the head excreting a whopping salamander-colored fudgemuffin the consistency of congealed pork fat in the swirly station. God damn if I didn't Rothko that fucking cheap seat with my most rollicking dooderpike ever. Smelled like a robo drank a bottle of Torgo's Executive Powder, rolled around in a pile of yak back and hibernated in a pool of his own cowardice. All I know is I'm never eating at Arby's ever a-fucking-gain!

Torrents for Luddites

Here is what you will need.

1. Up to date antivirus software. Avast and AVG are free so there are no excuses.
2. Up to date antispyware software. AVG, Ad-Aware, and Spybot Search & Destroy are free so no excuses.
3. A bit torrent client (might I suggest uTorrent)
4. Peer Guardian 2
5. A site from which to download torrents. Demonoid.com and/or stmusic.org are the best but require invites or an open enrollment period which, with Demonoid.com at least, are not infrequent but hard to catch if you aren't vigilant.

Step one.

Install Peer Guardian 2.
a.You don't have to run this program all the time but it absolutely must be running anytime you are using bit torrent or any other method of p2p sharing.

b. It should be updated at least once per day.

c. I use the default settings and I have every list blocked except "educational." You should probably block that one to. I just don't.

Step two.

Install uTorrent.
a. I recommend uTorrent because it is lightweight, easy, and has an encryption feature I suggest you use. Under Protocol Encryption I have Outgoing: set to Enable and the "Allow incoming legacy connections" box is checked. You don't have to check the box. Maybe you shouldn't check it. I have it checked and I'm OK with that.

b. Set up an isolated download location. If you aren't downloading huge files it might not be a bad idea to use a USB flash drive and just set that as the location in which pending and completed transfers are placed along with their torrent files. I have an old IDE drive which I screwed to the bottom of the inside of my desktop case. It isn't large or fast or special but I use it as a kind of holding area/cluttered junk yard of stuff I felt was worth keeping but not terribly important (funny pictures off the internet or whatever). On this drive I have two folders I use for bit torrent. One is called "torrents" and the other is called "unsorted." uTorrent puts all the torrents I download into the torrents file and once they are completed I move them to unsorted where they will eventually be named, altered, converted, or whatever happens to them on the way to their final destination.

c. Set up something other than the default bit torrent port. If you do not have an Xbox or Xbox 360 might I suggest using port 3074. If you do have an Xbox try port 3389. If you have a router you should enable UPnP port mapping in uTorrent and turn on UPnP in your router OR you must forward whatever port you use in uTorrent to your PC in your router's settings. This might involve static IPs and other things so you are better off just enabling UPnP in your router. If you are reading this you obviously have internet access so if you are unaware how to make these changes to your router I suggest using the internet to find out because I really don't want to have to try and walk anyone through it via IM or telephone. It's not hard and some day you'll have to learn to fly on your own so start flapping.

d. Don't be a leech. Set uTorrent to continue seeding a completed torrent until 175%. If you see a file has a setting > 1.0 then you can stop the torrent seeding. Until you hit 1.0 (1oo%) you have not given back as much as you have taken and should keep seeding. If you have a Demonoid.com or STMusic.org membership that began with an invite from me please remember that your overal ratio reflects on me so keep it >1. If you don't I will be very cross.


Step three.

Download torrent files
a. Download them to your desktop or a specific folder to start. Use the information provided. Don't download a torrent that says it has zero seeders. There's nobody sending the files so it might take forever to download the actual content if you are able to download it at all.

b. Opera has a built in bit torrent client so if you are trying to download torrent files in Opera it will want to open them itself. Circumvent that by right clicking the download link and choosing "save target as." The resulting file downloaded should end in ".torrent" and if it doesn't you are doing it wrong. Try again.

c. Double click on the files on the desktop and uTorrent will open them and display all the content this torrent will attempt to download. Uncheck anything you don't want to speed up the download.

d. When a torrent has completed downloading make sure you scan it before you do anything else with it. Scan the whole folder and be wary of any compressed files (.rar, .zip, .whatever) and don't open a .exe file that you've downloaded unless you damned well know what you are doing.

Step four.

???

Step five.

Profit!

---> If you use any of this information to download copyrighted material outside the bounds of the law then you should be aware that doing so runs the risk of being held accountable by agents of the law or litigious copyright holders and their nefarious representatives. If you download something illegal like copyrighted music, movies, games, books, comics, death star plans, terrorist propoganda, or underage Lithuanian horse porn and are subsequently sued, fined, jailed, extraordinarily renditioned, hauled to GITMO, or waterboarded it is not my fault or my responsibility. If you, though downloading files w/ bit torrent (even legal ones!), become infected with viruses, worms, malware, spyware, trojans, gonorrhea, or Lithuanian horse fleas I will accept no responsibility. You were warned. Take the proper precautions.

McLovin....

Creating the vernacular of the future.

Once in a while my tongue, along with assistance from my brain, turns a phrase worth keeping. It has happened a fair few times in my life. Some of those additions to my lexicon have gone on to wider use, always leaving me to wonder if I really started that or if I heard it somewhere, forgot about it, and the regurgitated it later as if it were my own idea.

NO MORE!

With this new recurring feature I will be posting words or phrases that I create as soon as I've been through the initial vetting process and decided they are part of my permanent vocabulary.

Creating the vernacular of the future: Episode I

-The word "campers" used in place of the word "intense" used in place of words like "awesome."
Example: Dude! Did you see that fall? That was freakin' campers, man! (No. I don't talk like that.)

I hope this is tasty.

I needed to use up some BBQ leftovers inthe freezer and I think I've thought of the perfect way. It's baking now so soon we shall know just how perfect is my genius (the word genius looks really weird and wrong to me today for some reason- I actually had to spell check it 'cause I was convinved it was wrong).

A while back I started taking tubes of bulk sausage (like Jimmy Dean type stuff) and smoking them whenever I BBQ. It's called "smokin' a fatty." I had 1.5 of those which I chopped up in the food processor this morning.

A few weeks ago I smoke a pork shoulder and the results were amazing. Unfortunately pulled pork doesn't reheat that well. I had about 12oz of that which I took out of the freezer and chopped in the food processor this morning.

A month or more ago I took some smoked sausage( see above), chopped it up, added cream cheese, marscapone cheese, herbs, spices, and hot sauce and piped the mixture into peppers which I wrapped in bacon and smoked on the BBQ. They were good but they were too much work. I decided not to do them again. Subsequently I had a bunch of the cheese mixture left over. I combined the leftover cheese mixture with a container of cottage cheese and a couple of eggs and gave that a whirl in the food processor this morning.

A while back I discovered the 3way potato at skyline chili. I have discovered that I can successfully duplicate them at home by buying frozen skyline chili. This made me wonder if I could make good chili (which I normally.. or used to not like). My first attempt was a fairly easy number using a processed chili seasoning packet (Cincinnati Style) and (a recurring theme here) a bit of smoked sausage added to the ground beef. It was quite good and made excellent 3way potatoes but I had a fair bit left over, which I thawed out this morning.

Now if you had all of these things what would you make?
Lasagna!!!! sort of!

Take lasagna recipe and replace tomato sauce with chili, replace ricotta with the cheese mixture, replace italian sausage with ground fatty and leftover pulled pork, and replace mozerella and provolone with cheddar and monterey jack.

I also made corn pudding to go along with it in my brand new cast iron pan (which looks pretty old but who knows) that I found in the stairwell of an antique shop/farmer's market place south of Centerville. Every time I say corn pudding out loud I want to giggle. It is delicious though.
http://seriouslygood.kdweeks.com/2005/08/corn-pudding.html there's the recipe I used, though I made some minor additions. I should have added some onion, now that I think about it. Oh well.

Laterman and Battosai Acc

Mezzo and I entered a SWBF2 game on xbox live last night because my xbox was freezing up when I was hosting.  The game was hosted by "Laterman."  When we first joined Laterman was on one team and Battosai Acc was on the other.  I think they were in a game just to try and kill each other and were offended when other people joined.  After a minute or two it was 4 to 1 with Battosai Acc playing by himself.  So Mezzo and I switched over to join his team... and he promptly team killed us.  Maybe it was a mistake.  So we stood still a minute with nobody from the other team around to see if he's do it again.  He did.  We said screw that.  If he's gonna be a douche we'll go back to the other team again.  So we left Battosai all alone.  His buddy Laterman felt sorry for him and joined him.  It was everyone against those two.  They are good, no doubt, but it's funny how good they are.  See, the only way they could kill anybody is to ignore everyone else and tag team a single person at a time.  They really weren't all that good at that, either.  Unfortunately the other players in the game were kinda ..not very good.. so it soon became a "hunt the mezzo and whackly game."  That was fun for a minute until they started spawn camping us to where we would get force thrown the moment we spawned without having time to even move, let alone aim and shoot.  I decided that if this was a game hosted by a dick, for dicks in which to be dicks I was going to be a dick.  I went back to their team and just started killing myself.   Mezzo soon joined me and we were happily team killing each other.  All pretty boring right?  Well when Mezzo and I were on their team we could hear everything they said through the TV.  We were using our original XBOXs not 360s so we didn't have our headsets on (like I want to go hunting for that in the cavern of cords, dongles, and termination in my closet).  These guys were laughing about how badly everyone else sucks which doing exactly the things they said other people suck for doing.  They completely misunderstood what was going on and why and through it all demonstrated that they were definately flying below the clouds in the median IQ department.  It was like listening to accountants drone on and on about numbers.... if accountants didn't understand numbers and had the voices of washed up stoners who reached the crest of their lives the day they the new VS trading card game packs were released.  What's the point of all this?  There isn't one, except to say that I'm fairly certain that Laterman and Battosai Acc are not cool enough to pop a collar or wear a crooked visor but not quite nerdy enough to be smart either.  The ever oscillating limbo of mediocrity is like mother's milk to the asocial and ambiguously gay.

I forgot about this until just now!

I might have been in a world of danger today. I might not have been. Who knows. It gave me the heebie jeebies for real.

From time to time, in the course of my job, I find myself in the homes of customers. Sometimes, no matter what we do, we just can't solve a problem without somebody going out there in person. Usually, in such instances, the problem has nothing to do with us but customers don't understand that and with threaten to stop being customers if we don't fix it. I go, and fix it, and show them that it wasn't our problem (every once in a while it acutally is).

Today I went to such a house. It was an old home and not in the greatest neighborhood. Not a scary neighborhood but the sort of neighborhood where there are too many industrial buildings nearby for you to really feel like you'd be safe walking around at night. This appointment, however, was not during night time.

I knocked on the door and a young man answered and invited me in. I walked in and noticed the place was sparsly furnished and immaculate. No dirt anywhere. Nothing out of place. There was a TV with a DVD player and a cable box and a couple of large couches, a coffee table and thick curtains on every arched doorway and window... ... and nothing else.... except...

Occupying every seat in the house were middle aged men. They were all similarly and neatly dressed in slacks, silk shirts with busy patterns, and various manner of jacket (blazer, leather, addidas jogging, etc.). There were a lot of shirts with the top 3 buttons undone, a fair amount of tan skin covered in dense hair, gold chains, nice watches and more than a few bulges under the left hand side of the shirt.

Nobody smiled, nobody talked. Everybody looked. AWKWARD! I think I'd just discovered the local hangout for the local branch of the Armenian gangsters from Weeds. I just queued up my best set of manners, smiled and went about my business. I was, however, thinking I'd like to leave quickly.

My fears were seemingly confirmed when I got upstairs and it was apparent that the equipment I was to be working on was stolen. One of the computers in the room was having netowrking issues. The young man who let me in had no idea what the password was. It was his sister's and she'd forgotten, he said. I'm fairly certain that nobody in that guys family was named Emily. He had another laptop but had "misplaced" the power adapter and hadn't had a chance to buy a new one. It had a Hannah Montana sticker on it. Again, very unlikely this guy was a Hannah Montana fan. He was extremely worried about security and whether or not anyone could or would be able to view his information or get into his computers. He didn't even want drivers installed unless I could explain how they were both necessary and safe. I cursed myself for even noticing this stuff and promised myself I would never enter another customer home unless my eyes were wide SHUT.

As I was terminating a cable and getting ready to check that I'd fixed the first of the seemingly endless supply of questions he had I heard a cash counter running in the room next door. Those of you who have used one or heard one used you will agree that it is a distinctive sound. Nothing else really sounds like it. I paused when I heard it and the guy I was with excused himself momentarily and went down the hall and shut the door to the room where the cash couter was operating.

At least they were trying to hide what they were up to. Perhaps they were more afraid of me than I was of them. I think the pistols under the jackets testify otherwise.

I just wanted out. I was trying to hurry but every time I though I was done this guy had more questions. This doesn't work. How do I fix that? I don't have the cisco management software; where can I get it? I was in there for an hour and 15 minutes before I finally found my opening.

P.S. I think it worth noting, though not necessarily important to the story, that there were women there as well. They were silent, scarved, and ninja quiet as the floated around changing coasters, bringing drinks, cleaning up, closing and opening drapes, etc.

Now In o))Stereo((o

I have enabled comment moderation over at M.F. J.R. and thus no longer feel a need to keep quiet about it.

BBQ Time once more

It's a Saturday and I'm not on call. You know what that means.

A reader and fellow BBQ fan had stated that he had a hard time getting any kind of significant smoke ring to show up when smokin a fatty (bulk sausage roll). He seemed incredulous when I mentioned I had no problems getting .25 to .5 inches of smoke ring on mine. I think it has more to do with what you put on them before you smoke. Having rolled a few in black pepper it has become clear that the black pepper coating acts as a barrier which reduces the penetration of the smoke. Here is a picture of some slices of the first one I pulled off the heat today. The first to hit 160. The smoke ring penetrates a bit over .25 inches towards the center of the meat.

The three I cooked today were completely untreated and put on the BBQ fresh out of the packaging as an experiment to see if any kind of rub or seasoning is really needed. It isn't. From this day forward I think I'll just throw them on unseasoned. It leaves the application window open a little wider. I chopped up half of one of these bad boys and added it to some chili I made. It was excellent.

*Sigh*

I just said this to someone via IM and thought it was important enough to share.
I realized today that I work for a company whose inefficiencies are its saving grace. My employer could be a fuck-up of epic proportions... ...except fucking up that badly requires some organization and planning.

In order to crash and burn you have to take off. My employer is on the runway trying to figure out if they filed the right flight paperwork, whether or not the pre-flight checklist was properly reviewed, triple checking to make sure the right fuel was put in with the understanding that it's easier to triple check and refuel than to give the guy at the pump the tools to tell which fuel to pump in the first place, and whether or not an advertisement that implies, or at the very least could be construed as, a joke about drug addiction will get you into less trouble if you claim it was a mistake of groupthink boardroom brainstorming and share the blame or if you all band together and scapegoat one person who is in sales and subsequently will not be punished or reprimanded in any way for any action up to and included porking his boss on her office desk...

I suppose we all knew it was coming...

I hadn't checked my email in 12 hours.  I should have done it sooner.  The offer has come through and I've accepted it.  I'll be moving back to MN.  Maple Lake in fact.  Celltech (they do wireless meter reading tech for Xcel Energy) has expanded operations in MN and I'm in.  Goodbye OH.  Hello MN.  Good old high taxes, bad drivers, cold that'll crack the hair off your balls, hot-dish, in-laws, and plain old good natured alcoholism.  It'll be fun to be back in MN... at least until October.