Category Archives: Uncategorized

Great linkage

For those of you with any taste in design or architecture (or just want a good laugh), I would like to direct you to James Howard Kunstler’s Eyesore of the Month, a showcase of design disasters with suitably pithy and amusing (and occasionally profane) commentary.

For those of you who went to Virginia Tech, I especially point you to the April, 2001 edition – I agree wholeheartedly with his comments!

Link provided by the always-fabulous BoingBoing

On a more serious note

We also got some important news yesterday. takaza‘s surgery has been scheduled for Friday, December 19. There are two possible outcomes: the good one has him in the hospital overnight then recovering for a week or two before going back to work. The not-so-good one has him in the hospital for four to five days and recovery will take more like four to six weeks. It’s impossible to know which outcome we’ll be seeing until after the surgery starts, so I’m preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. We appreciate all of the good thoughts and prayers from all of our friends, and we’ll be sure to keep everyone updated as things progress.

As an aside, I’d note that unfortunately we may not be able to host our annual Orphan’s Christmas dinner – we’ll have to figure out on the fly if Dan will be up for it. Likewise the New Year’s Eve Party, though I’m a bit more optimistic about that. Again, we’ll keep folks updated once we know what’s going on after the surgery.

And now, off to make myself useful!

It was a good night.

People liked the music (and I just want to say that I would never use Kazaa Lite to track down requests on the spot for people. That Would Be Wrong). Hell, they were actually out on the dance floor, for the first time in three years. We walked away with $150 from the “Money Machine” (bunch of bills blown around in a chamber) and a couple of nice gift certificates.

A pretty good night overall.

Happiness is…

Having to DJ your husband’s company’s Holiday Party and discovering that the building has unencrypted wireless access with broadband Internet.

Damn, this evening just got a whole lot more entertaining…

Well, that’s that

So, wildmouse was kind enough to proctor my final exam for my Introduction to HACCP class last night, a favor for which I thanked her with a Granny’s Apple Pie apple from Rocky Mountain Spotted Chocolate Factory. Nummy! The test was easy, all of twenty questions, multiple choice and true/false. It took maybe 20 minutes, then I spent the better part of an hour and a half chatting, helping her and me_not_you plan for their Christmas party next weekend, and enjoying a glass of their excellent Remy Martin XO cognac.

The good news is that with that exam, in addition to the three papers and other final exam I completed earlier this week, I am now completely finished with classwork for this semester. The feedback I’ve gotten from my professors has been rather minimal, but as near as I can tell I’ve gotten well above the 80%-or-better grades required to get my HACCP certificate. If all goes well, I might even get a shiny star on it if my grades are over 90%.

Does this certificate actually get me anything? Probably not. But it improved my knowledge of food processing a bit, it put my student loans on hold for four months (which more than covered my tuition!), and gave me the ability to say that I was taking classes for the last few months instead of sitting on my ass. I doubt I’ll be taking the second tier of classes because it just doesn’t seem to really get me anything. A cursory review of “Food Safety Manager” jobs listed on Monster and Careerbuilder shows one or two jobs at most, and those require a minimum of 3-5 years’ experience in the food field. So no more school for me, at least in the near future.

This leaves me with my life again. Now that I’ve wrapped up classes and MFF is past and hiring is pretty much completely dead until after the holidays, I’ll have a lot more time available to me. This is nice, because I’ve got a number of things I’d like to do. I need to wrap up some stuff from MFF this year and planning for next year. I also want to cook a bit more – we’ve been getting by on a lot of really boring and uninspiring dinners, and now I have the time to do something about it. And finally, I want to get outdoors a bit more – some more hiking, and also get back into geocaching. I’ve been too much of a couch potato for the last three months, and I want to do something to improve on that. On the entertaining horizon, we’re going to host an Orphan’s Christmas Dinner the night before/night after Christmas to which the Gang and all of our friends are invited. We’re also hosting a New Years Eve party, though we’ve not even begun planning that one.

So that’s the current state of the husky. For today: meet takaza at Carolina Wine Company to pick out some wines for his company’s Holiday Party (which I am also the DJ for). Also, I need to get some lists of cheesy dance music and check our MP3 directory to see if we have it, otherwise it’s off for a little P2P surfing. Tonight, dinner with friends at a truly yummy restaurant! And tomorrow evening, the Holiday Party. And on Sunday, we rest. Yay!

MFF report still to come. Really! I mean it!

Husky’s Return English Special Bitter

(Just to commit this to Memories, and to share with all you brewers out there)

Husky’s Return English Special Bitter
Brewed by Duncan da Husky, 26 October, 2003

Ingredients
7 lbs Pale/Light Malt Extract
2 lbs Amber malt extract
2 oz. Galena hop pellets (60 minutes)
2 oz. Goldings hop pellets (15 minutes)
1 tsp. Irish moss
1 oz. Goldings hop pellets (10 minutes)
1 pkg. Wyeast London ESB liquid yeast #1968

Instructions
(Directions assume you’re using a turkey fryer burner and a 5-gallon brewpot)
1. Place malt extract in hot water to thin it out
2. Place 2 gallons of water into brewpot and put on burner on high
3. When water comes to a boil, turn off burner
4. Add malt extract to the pot – pour off unused amount first
5. Stir until completely dissolved
6. Restart the burner and partially cover the pot.
7. When pot comes to a boil, add the first hop addition
8. Skim the foam from the pot from time to time
9. Add second hops addition and Irish moss
10. Add third hops addition
11. Turn off the heat and cover the pot with foil then the lid
12. Cool the wort as quickly as possible by placing the pot in a sink and submerging the bottom with cold water and ice while stirring constantly
13. Pour three gallons of water into the fermenter
14. When wort if cooled to 120 F, add to fermenter (Aerate!)
15. Wait until the wort is below 80 F before pitching yeast
16. Check and record specific gravity
17. Place blow-off tube on fermenter, place other end of tube in pot of water, making sure the end is submerged.
18. After blow-off period (2 days maximum), replace blow-off tube with airlock.
19. Ferment at 65 F for a total of ten days before bottling (air lock will stop “blooping”)
20. Let condition in the bottle at least one week before drinking, and preferably at least two weeks.

Original Gravity (5 gallons): 1.060
Final gravity (at bottling): 1.014
Alcohol content: 4.83%

Notes: Extremely vigorous blow-off – lost a good two quarts of wort (sob!). Finished product is excellent – malty, not too hoppy. I’d make this one again.

Actual content coming soon

Yes, I’ve got a con report in the works, but I have a paper and two finals still to go this week, so that will wait. In the meantime, may I present you with this lovely, Not-Safe-For-Work link for the latest in personal hygiene:

Sphincterine!
It’s refreshing! It tingles!
Available now at http://www.mintyass.com/!

Explanation: We heard about this on Sirius Satellite Radio‘s OutQ Network, on the fabulous Derek and Romaine Show as part of their “Naughty But Nice Holiday Gift Guide.” Very, very cool!

Registration Musings

Well, I have yet to write up even a semi-coherent post about Midwest FurFest, but in the meantime, I want to address a topic near and dear to my heart: Registration. It’s funny, because in all the con reports I’ve read I haven’t seen a lot of mention of registration, something which is just fine with me. Reg is one of those things you only hear a lot about when things go wrong, and things went spectacularly right for us this year.

Preparations for this year were more stressful in years past. I was stupid and didn’t follow the timeline I set out for myself last year (you know, the one that I made so I wouldn’t go insane?) and for that I paid the price of large quantities of stress. Everything came together on Tuesday before the con when the registration bags arrived five hours before we drove out for Chicago. That’s cutting things a bit too close. Next year, this Will Not Be The Case.

We also got an unpleasant surprise when we arrived at the hotel: the coat closet that we had used in previous years was completely unavailable to us due to being flooded two weeks prior and they had STILL not found or repaired the leak. This meant that we had to set up in the hallways in front of the coat check, and in hindsight this was actually a Good Thing. We had a lot more space to work with, and I think we actually handled attendees better with this configuration than we would have otherwise, although it was at a cost of packing everything up every night, something that was distinctly unpleasant but not too onerous. We’ll be sticking with this configuration for next year, with some minor adjustments (and having the coat closet available for storage will make it much more livable!)

Then the people came. And came. And came. This year we added a time stamp to every badge printed, so I was able to do traffic analysis. At the peak of processing on Thursday night, we registered one person every twenty seconds. On Friday morning, with fewer people and fewer stations that went up to one person every thirty seconds. Damn. To the best of my knowledge no one waited longer than fifteen minutes to get their badge all weekend. I consider that damn good, but there’s still room for improvement. We have some changes to make to our system, both in software and hardware, that will really speed things along. Next year, my goal is that no one waits longer than ten minutes. We’ll see if we can hit that.

I suppose I’m making this all sound like I did it myself, and I want to assure everyone that I am laboring under no such delusions. This was very much a team effort, and there’s a great many thank-you’s to go out, starting first and foremost with rustitobuck. Rusty is responsible for all the programming for the registration database, and this is the third year in a row that it has worked and worked well. Even in the face of printer issues (as in, nothing would print!) hours before Registration opened on Thursday, he held everything together and came through with a system that withstood the beating that we gave it. You’re awesome, Mr. Wookiee, and I can’t thank you enough!

My second-in-command, DaveQat, did a fine job of keeping things running and sorting through issues in my absence and even when I was there. Be ready for a lot more to do in the coming year, Dave, ’cause I’m ready to offload some of these preparations to you!

Then there’s my staff. At times I feel sort of like an Amway salesman, dragging friends onto Registration staff whether they like it or not. They put up with me, though, somehow, and do an amazing job. It’s because of these great people that we were able to be as efficient as we were and they deserve your thanks:
Ramalion (I so owe you for this, and the next time I’m at MFM I know where I’ll be working!), Osiris (kittylad), Tsuki, Benjie (boixboi), Rasslor, Feren (because, you know, Art Show didn’t give him enough to do…), Jackie (my mother-in-law :-), Synicism, Tecknow, damnbear (hey, how’d you get in there?), and Rolliebear. Y’all are all fantastic, and I can’t begin to express how grateful I am for your help during the convention.

Many thanks, too, to the fabulous gophers cuttercoon (you were there when I needed you!), bakimono (so quiet and efficient I forgot to mention you), and Cheesecake (chsck83) (damn, even I don’t pull six-and-a-half hour shifts at Registration!). I appreciate the time you volunteered and hope you enjoyed it as well.

And finally, thanks very, very much to my beloved husband, Takaza, who not only put up with my annoying crap leading up to the con, but provided support throughtout the con and ordered pizza for us on Thursday night so my Registration staff was fed and happy! He’s really neat, and I’m going to keep him 🙂

So there you have it. We rocked this year, quite frankly, and we have set the standard for next year. And with the crew that I have (and any other interested folks who care to join us), I am absolutely certain that we can be even better next year. Way to go, folks!

Why Chicago weather amuses me so much

The weather forecast for the coming weekend:

Friday
Mostly sunny and mild. High around 70. Low in the lower 50s.
Saturday
Partly cloudy. High in the upper 60s. Low around 50.
Sunday
Mostly cloudy with a 30 percent chance of rain. High around 60. Low in the middle or upper 30s.
Monday
Mostly cloudy with a chance of rain and snow. Much colder. High in the middle or upper 30s. Chance of precipitation 40 percent.

Something for everyone!

Last minute preparations

Putting boxes, boxes, and more boxes inside The Box. We didn’t actually need to see out the back window, did we? Still need to leave room for the suitcase and for the boxes arriving by FedEx tomorrow. Everything fits – barely.

So for tomorrow:

  • Mail tax info on Saturn to Wake County (yes! It’s gone! No, I don’t have to pay taxes on it!)
  • Do laundry
  • Pack suitcase and toiletries
  • Clean house (finally, we can get rid of the clutter!)
  • Pack last bits of stuff into the Element
  • Wash inside windows of the Element
  • Fill Element with gas
  • Pick up Takaza at work at 3 PM and hit the road!

And for now…to bed!

Updata

So, we’re into another week. Another day closer to MFF. Yeek.

No new word on the job front, but that’s cool. I’m keeping my fingers crossed on the job in Ohio – it would be a good position, I think, even if the location may not be the greatest. We could certainly do worse.

We had a busy weekend. On Friday, me_not_you and wildmouse and Thomas and Sherry came over and we cooked up steaks and enjoyed some excellent wine. Hey, Rasslor – we finally cracked open the Habersham Winery Georgia Scarlett and, I have to say, it was excellent! Thanks again from bringing it up, and maybe next time you bring a bottle we’ll actually open it while you’re here so you can have some 🙂

Saturday was an interesting bit of choreography. After seeing takaza off to a physical therapy appointment, I joined Donald and Janelle in a trip up to the local homebrewing shop (the only one in a 50-mile radius, I might add). We picked up another carboy and the ingredients for a brown ale. We met up with Dan in time for lunch at the tasty MacGregor Ale House (mmm, good food and football. Yeah!), then adjourned back to the house. Dan squeezed in a bit of work on the con book and also made a tasty beef stew while I made brownies. Then it was time to hustle over to Thomas and Sherry’s for their Halloween party. Great food, great company, lots of really good wine and champagne. Mmmm, yummy,

Was the night over after that? No! It was time to stop by Clyde and Pony’s Halloween shindig that they threw for the CarolinaFurs (hell, it was all of five minutes from our house – it’s not like we had any excuse not to stop by and be sociable). It was a pleasure to meet Clyde and Pony, and it’s always great to see Perro. We met the elusive tervicz, played with Pooka, Clyde and Pony’s adorable husky, and got to meet Pony’s neurotic bird and his ill-tempered mutant lake bass. Somehow, we also wound up talking MFF business while we were there (how the hell did that happen?) and put some folks’ minds to rest about some misinterpretations of the Artists’ Den rules. Anyway, we also saw zenwolph there and, as planned, he crashed for the night at our place not long after.

On Sunday, after a lovely morning of chatting with Zen and enjoying some tasty French toast, Donald and Thomas came over and we cooked up the brown ale we had bought the ingredients for on Saturday. All went well and I sent five gallons on beer home with Donald, where I’m sure it’s bubbling and foaming away even as I type this. Zen sacked out on the couch for a few hours, which was cool because that gave us a bit of time to unwind and read the newspaper. Once he got motivated again, we grabbed dinner at Chili’s, then sent him on his way back to Richmond. We spent the evening working on the Restaurant Guide and conbook stuff – a quiet night, but pleasant.

So, for the near future: More work on the restaurant guide today, putting together a map for it. Possibly might work up a big map with numbers keyed to the individual restaurants that we could post someplace – we’ll see how motivated I am. I need to get the attendee badge layout to Dan tonight so it can go to the printer tomorrow, and sometime soon, as soon as it’s all finalized, grab the programming schedule off the web and convert it into some format suitable for the con book. Oh, and somewhere in there I have to continue working on the HACCP course – I finished all the coursework on the other two classes I’m taking, but the HACCP course is going to require more time. With luck I can wrap it up before MFF, though.

Beer-wise, thebroomecloset and ovrclockd expressed interest in making a batch of stout, so that may well be next on the agenda. I also want to make a batch of Christmas beer (similar to Anchor’s fabulous annual Christmas brews) that I can put into the keg and serve at the Gang Christmas party (and probably for a good while thereafter, but that’s OK). Those might have to wait until after we get back from Chicago, though, since the next two weeks are going to be somewhat insane. We’ll definitely be bottling the English Special Bitter that I currently have in the fermenter this week, probably on Tuesday. That should be ready for MFF – talk to me if you’d like to try a sample 😉 On a side note, I found that the venerable Cat’s Meow, the immense compendium of homebrew recipes that was a great reference when I was brewing back at Virginia Tech, is still around and even downloadable in PDF – all 310 pages of it (the first link is browsable in HTML, though). It’s a great resource, and I’m awed as ever by the compiled wisdom of the net working together to continue to keep it around and available (and even providing an updated way to share recipes!)

And now, off to start the day!

And on the job front…

After a long, long drought things are finally starting to look up. I had a phone interview with Noveon this morning for a job at their Avon Lake, OH plant. Yeah, I know – directly on the receiving end of lake effect snow. Well, that’s bearable, I think. The position sounds like a good one – extremely similar to my last position except with some different technologies. The phone interview went well, I think – I established a great rapport with the engineer I spoke with, and he seemed to think I’d be a good fit for the job. I should hear in two weeks if they want me to come in to interview. Hmm – I may be flying out for a job interview from Chicago, for the second year in a row. Well, that keeps life interesting.

I also have a line on a job in a much less desirable place. Initially, the job is in Edison, NJ, then after six months moves out to Hackettstown, NJ. The latter is bearable, even pleasant, the former…well, I’d rather not, but it is a job. I kind of doubt I have the background they’re looking for on that one, but it continues to be a possibility.

Takaza went up to Duke Medical Center this morning to get a second opinion on some of the medical issues he’s had lately. No immediate answers there, but I feel a lot better knowing that several people are looking into the problem. Duke has a good reputation, and I’m confident that he’ll get excellent care from there.

Not too much else going on this week. Frantic preparations for MFF continue apace, with lots of editing still to be done for Dan. We’re getting together tonight to carve pumpkins over at me_not_you and wildmouse‘s, then there’s Thomas and Sherry’s Halloween party on Saturday. And yes, Perro and ZenWolph, we’ll see you at the CarolinaFur Halloween party later that night – we may not show until 10 PM or so, though.

And now, I’m heading out to do a bit of grocery shopping, pick up some pumpkins, and maybe even get a hair cut. Ah, the glamour and excitement that is my life!

It’s that time of the year!

Not My LiveJournal Trick-or-Treat Haul
duncandahusky goes trick-or-treating, dressed up as Magellan Meridian GPS Receiver.
aerofox gives you a cute plush foxie!
brophey gives you two passes to see Brother Bear
damnbear tricks you! You get to run MFF Registration for the next three years.
datahawk gives you a hockey stick and a Carbon Leaf bumper sticker.
feren gives you a snarky comment and a bowlful of very spicy stir-fried food.
linnaeus gives you a bottle of exploding root beer.
me_not_you tricks you! You get peanut butter buttcheeks.
partran gives you something that can’t be described in polite company.
rustitobuck gives you a copy of Panther and a Goose Island Orange Cream soda.
takaza tricks you! But he gives you a kiss anyway.
duncandahusky ends up with lots of cool stuff and you didn’t, nyeah nyeah nyeah.
Another fun hijacked meme brought to you by Duncan da Husky.

Laptop update

Well, the good news is that I was able to save all of my data off the drive. The bad news is that after attempting to reinstall with the OEM CD’s several times only to have the laptop shut itself off at random intervals in the middle of the install, it’s abundantly clear that what we have here is a hardware problem.

I’ve faxed in my proof of purchase to Sony, and theoretically, within three days they should ship me a nice empty box. I send that back to them and (again, theoretically), within seven days they send me back my laptop, all fixed and purty. In the meantime, I’ll probably be using my old Windows 98 box that had been exiled to the basement, at least until Dan’s new laptop comes in.

Yes, because Dan has to surrender his laptop come MFF (since it is, after all, property of the convention, and will pass on to the next Publications Director), we need to get a new laptop. After much hemming and hawing, we’re going with an HP Windows laptop instead of getting another iBook. Although the iBook would be preferable, it’s a couple hundred dollars more expensive and we just can’t beat the twelve-months-same-as-cash deal with Best Buy. It’s a shame, because OS X is infinitely more stable than Windows and Dan really prefers it, but when your finances are as ugly as ours right now, well, sacrifices musty be made.

So that’s where things stand right now. By the way, Feren – I did get your email, thanks! I appreciate the offer of assistance but right now it’s in the hands of Sony. With luck we’ll get a quick resolution and life can get back to normal, or as normal as my life gets anyway.

Laptop go down da hoooole

So, I’m typing this up in the basement. I’d like to be upstairs with Takaza but you see, this is where one of the few working computers at my disposal is. I knew that my laptop was in one of those infamous Windows Death Spirals, but I was caught off-guard when I tried to reboot and got “WindowsConfigSyetem is missing or corrupt”. Now it just won’t boot, period, and even when it tries it sometimes shuts off on its own. I have a sneaking suspicion that while there is a problem with the drive there’s also problems elsewhere as well.

We were able to procure an IDE/Mini-IDE interface last night and get the drive hooked up to the roommate’s Win2K box. It reads the drive fine, which is cool. I tried to copy over the contents of my My Documents folder and started getting CRC after CRC error. Badness. So, I set it to run Scandisk last night and went to bed. As soon as John is up and I can gain access to the Win2K box I’ll try copying the data over again. I don’t think I’ve lost any recent data, though some random files from the past are toast. Man, this sucks.

Once I can get everything I need to off the drive, I hope to put it back into the laptop, try to reinstall with the OEM CD’s that I know don’t work, call Sony and get replacement CD’s, and then we’ll see what happens after that. I hope I don’t have to pack it up and send it off, but that’s definitely a possibility. The good news is that I bought the thing on October 30 last year, so we’re still (just) inside the 1-year warranty.

Anyway, if you’re trying to reach me, be aware that I don’t quite have the easy net access that I have in the past. I’ll be checking e-mail regularly, though, somehow, and will endeavor to keep up with friends, email, and MFF business (and to not go insane as I try to fix all this).

A scattered update

Pretty quiet week last week – not too much to report. One bit of good news: The unemployment benefits that I thought were pretty much gone for good are suddenly back! With the renewed benefit year (i.e. I’ve been out of work for over a year now), my weekly benefit goes up slightly and I get fourteen weeks of benefits. This is genuinely good news! It means that we’re covered through the middle of January, which is cool, and our savings will hold out that much longer. We’re going into the November-December job drought, and virtually no one is going to be hiring after Halloween. Still, I’ll keep trying. I do get nibbles from recruiters a few times a week still, which is good. We’ll keep hoping something will come of this.

On the downside, jlfranklin, our roommate/landlord, joined the ranks of the unemployed last week. Not sure yet exactly what this might mean. He’s meeting with a realtor this week to discuss his options on the house here, and looking at fixing up his townhouse in Blacksburg, VA, and moving up there. This would leave us in the market for a place to live, and if we have to move I wonder if we’re better off sticking it out around here or just biting the bullet and heading up to Chicago (presupposing takaza could get a job at his company’s HQ in Buffalo Grove). Well, we live in exciting times.

One item of note last week, though: Takaza finally got fed up with the local radio market. We took the plunge and picked up a Sirius satellite radio for the Element. It’s pretty damn cool, I’ve got to say, and is going to be a godsend when we drive up to Chicago. A great selection of music, plus two channels of NPR, one of PRI, and a whole host of other interesting, offbeat stations. I like it!

We spent the weekend hanging out with zenwolph. It was great fun, although we didn’t do too much. Spent some time at the NC State Fair, and we did a little shopping for homebrewing equipment. Yes, after eight years away from the hobby, it looks like I’m getting back into it. I’ll blame Linnaeus for rekindling my interest in it. I’ll probably have some of my first batch available at MFF, assuming everything goes well. More on that later this week.

Midwest Furfest is a little over a month away now. It sounds like we’re going to get a tremendous turnout for Thursday night, so I’m working hard to get staff for that night since most of the people working Registration won’t be in until Friday. Anyone interested in working a few hours on Thursday? It’s good for double gopher hours! It’s also just plain fun, in my opinion. Drop me a line here or at duncan [at] wolfhusky.org if you’re interested. Otherwise, I’ve been working hard ordering stuff for the con, and generally spending the con’s money (mmm, other people’s money. Always so much fun!) We’re going to have some great stuff for people, though, and I think they’re going to like it. Our guests of honor have really come through with some fabulous artwork for some of the items, and I think everyone is going to be pleased.

On my list of things to do this week is to finish editing down the Restaurant Guide. I’ve gotta say this: if you see Chouette at the convention, be sure to thank her for doing a purely fabulous job on updating the restaurant guide! She contacted every restaurant in there, updated all of their info on hours, addresses, and added other info, plus eliminated the places that are gone and added a good number of new restaurants. She’s done an amazing job and I’m sure everyone is going to like the finished product.

Finally, I’ve committed to finishing all of my classes by the end of the month. It’s going to be a near thing to do it all in the next two weeks, but I think it’s possible. And with that, I’m off to go to work on some classwork now. Have a great day, everyone!