Month: July 2006

Another Window(TM) closes…

Readers that come to my site may already know the mess that is my office. Refresh this site enough and in the header image will give you a tiny peek of the chaos. The picture does not do the true mess justice, because two machines are not in the frame, an IPCop Firewall box on a Pentium II and an XP machine running a 1.8Ghz Pentium 4. The latter has been my Windows whipping boy, abused for its disk space and exploited for its TV tuner… until now. Over the years and three TV tuners, due to power spikes and lighting strikes this last TV tuner has degraded.

Weeks ago, I bought a usb stick TV tuner, I’m not going to mention the vendor or supplier… this isn’t a viral marketing post. It arrived the other day and I attached it to the gracefully aging iMac (17-inch USB 2.0, Horizon, Q26C). It’s turning out to be a good system. I haven’t used any of recording/transcoding EyeTV features that came with the hardware, but I’m excited that they are there.

So, what’s in store for my fading XP box? Hook up M.A.M.E. and my two-player X-arcade

confessions of a husky boy: office donuts

I awoke this morning, late. Knowing full well that the potential for well balanced meals lay dormant in the kitchen, I headed out the door. [ For some regular readers, please do not consider this as a leitmotif. ] Blearily made it to work thinking that I’d walk to the corporation’s commissary for a bite to eat, scratching cardio and daily allotment of nitrates off the to-do list.

Silently typing away at my computer without my first cup of coffee, the boss comes in, after two weeks of leave with boxes of breakfast pastry. Now, I’m going to chalk this up to weariness but when there was nobody I took a peek at the boxes. Not having taken a donut in many a week, I felt justified. None of my top favorites were there, no buttermilk or sour cream, cruller, nor fruit filled. I settled for a lovely glazed yeast-risen donut. As I took the first bite, I savored the lovely sweetness — soft chew and smooth crumb. Grabbing a coffee from the suite’s coffee station, I promptly finished the donut, but had a sinking feeling that I’d be asleep from the sugar shock by 0900.Feeling dirty, I decided to write about this. The more shameful side-note of this story, is that I’m already half-way through a chocolate chip muffin as I type this line.

confessions of a husky boy: the slurpee

Not that many people know that Detroit is the largest consumer of the 7-11 Slurpee in America, third in line globally behind Winipeg, Manitoba and Calgary, Alberta. We really can’t explain it why we like sucking these things down all year ’round, but we just love the sugary semi-frozen concoction. There’s nothing more iconic than the Slurpee in the heat of summer… well other than enjoying the Slurpee in the dead of winter while trying not to spin out on the snowy streets of Detroit.

Happily very year on July 11th, 7-11 celebrates a “birthday”. SlashFood clued me in that that participating 7-11 stores are giving away three million of these frosty treats in special “Happy Birthday” 7.11oz cups.

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