There is a dog lying on my foot.
He is resting there wishing
That I had probably not
passed wind
I wonder what he thinks about me
I think he needs a bath
Author Archives: Randy Peterman
12 Steps for Food TV Addicts
- Admit you are powerless over your Food TV addiction
- Believe that a power greater than Alton, Emeril, Paula and Rachel exists, and can restore your sanity
- Make the dish, I mean decision, to turn all authority over to God
- Make a fearless search of your pantry shelf self, morally
- Admitted to God and others, but not including Tyler Ramsey, the exact nature of yourself
- Be ready for God to remove the defects of your chiffon character
- Humbly ask God to remove your shortcakes shortcomings, and maybe break your TV remote on the Discovery channel. Mythbusters is safer than Good Eats.
- Make a grocery list of all the people we harmed, maybe bake them an apology cake
- Apologize to them, include gift cake, also bring celebratory home made ice cream, unless they’re diabetic
- Continue to make ingredient inventory, and when you are wrong or unsure, buy extra
- Pray for God’s will in your kitchen and television, and all other areas of your life
- We try to carry this message across the internet to other addicts by digging it, stumbling it, or otherwise twittering it
Parallels Shaking My Skepticism
I hate it when marketing junk floods out of the interwebs, television or radio [and magazine subscription inserts, but that’s different]. It comes out as ‘change your world’ kind of stuff and then you buy the product and end up shoving pencils into your eyes because you don’t want them to see lies any longer. After the expensive reconstructive surgery to your eyes you become a skeptic to all things marketing.
I am a marketing skeptic. I hate most of the junk that gets thrust before me because it is so manipulative. Turns out that the folks at Parallels are not lying and their upgrade for Desktop from 3.0 to 4.0 is actually faster. Dang it! I hate it when I can’t be a skeptic all of the time. Thanks Parallels for making a solid release in 4.0, its worth the upgrade.
Cleanliness is Next to Godliness
I finished installing the sound dampening accessories on our new dishwasher tonight. I had waited on the off chance of leaks from the new installation. No leaks meant silencers were to be installed. This washer is quiet now. The air gap which prevents backflow contamination is now louder when it’s draining than the washer is when it’s running.
I am going to say this: if you have a washer without a backflow prevention mechanism such as an air gap: get one. I can think of no other cheap installation that could be better for your home repair money. I could have possibly saved my old dishwasher from replacement had I known about the air gap. Installation took all of 20 minutes because I’m slow and wanted to triple check the connections.
So far I’m thrilled.
Also, I fixed a broken closet door tonight. Tip: don’t cut corners with “repairs”. The previous owner of this house did and I’m having to make up for it in dishwashers and wood and time :). Not that I mind. After hours in front of a computer screen physical labor is refreshing.
Mc-Corn-alds, Corner King and Corny’s All Sell Corn Fast Food
Recent research shows that almost every fast food item available at fast food restaurants contains corn [reference article]. For the record this isn’t entirely shocking. Beef cattle are often raised with corn feed as part of their diet, corn is a thickening agent in various liquidy or faux cheese products, and its also a handy ingredient to have around when you want pizza to not stick to a heating/cooking/baking rack. Its syrup is renowned for its smoothing abilities in sweet goods like caramel sauce and candy. Its a cheap (in part due to government subsidies) for sweetening soda, and its also got coloring abilities. You can’t beat corn’s versatility down, it does come with a lot of skills.
Some research has linked it to diabetes, obesity, and allergies of various sorts. I am allergic to corn myself, so having it is not a good choice for me. I just though I’d let you know that if you’re allergic to corn, too, most fast food places could be a bad place to get your food from 🙂
StopIE6.com
I have implemented on this blog a little bit of a banner that will show up if you happen to be using Internet Exploder 6 or lower. It will tell you about how you are ruining the quality of life for potentially thousands upon thousands of web developers. It will tell you that you should consider understanding the problem by going to StopIE6.com. If you have your own personal site and would like to do the same, feel free, just make sure that you do it kindly. We don’t need to be jerks, but we need to give a little love to the users who just might not know that the internet could look better than it does right now in Good Ole’ IE6.
Simple code for adding the banner are available at the StopIE6 site.
Mr. Handy Man
I have been doing home repair or maintenance type things the last couple weekends. I told Jessica not to make other plans and just dove into the mounting pile of things that needed attention. So far this is what I have done:
- Install dishwasher
- Install Air Gap for dishwasher to prevent backflow issues
- make cabinet divider and paint it
- Fix gate valve (I actually used a MAPP torch to sweat some pipes) that leads to sprinkler system
- Install pot lid drawer
- Fixed some hinges on a cupboard door
- Cleaned the garage
So, yeah, its nice to clear out a tiny bit of the honey-do list.
International Super Model Disaster Averted
In case you didn’t know it British singer Seal and German Super Model wife Heidi Klum announced before the November election that they would leave the United States if McCain won [source]. Because if there’s anything that sways American voters it is the threat of foreign celebrities leaving the country [they do have two children who are US citizens]. When you can charge as much as these two do for shows, appearances, and modeling I think its pretty safe to say that they could live in Mexico, fly to work every day, and still not panic about their finances.
I’m grateful that Senator Obama is now President Elect Obama because its rather clear that Senator McCain’s impact on world entertainment would have been devastating. It’s nice to know that Obama has the Seal of aproval from at least one super model.
Cats are for Sissies
We don’t have a cat. I’m allergic to cats. However, my sister-in-law has a dog. It is a Cocka-poo, which is a hybrid/mixed-breed and it pretty much looks like a poodle. I’d post pictures, but he’s got black hair (not fur) and I haven’t gotten a great photo yet. He brought a dead mouse into the kitchen and dropped it on the floor this evening for us. We don’t need cats, we have a dog.
I’m going to go throw up now, thanks.
Within Two Weeks
I just unsubscribed to an email newsletter from the Kodak corporation. One I did not expect to receive. One that should NOT be coming to my work email address. The fine folks there made me jump through hoops to unsubscribe from their email, something that should be simple to do. The ’email preferences’ part of their site didn’t even offer me the opportunity to unsubscribe, but their privacy section did offer me a link, in smaller print, to a place to insert multiple email addresses to unsubscribe from.
I got the ‘unsubscribed’ email to confirm the unsubscription. It told me that I’d most likely be unsubscribed within two weeks. I think that’s because the squirrels have to carry the message out from the large oak tree that the server is running in and carry the unsubscribe request to the carrier pigeons who fly to the coast where they then give it to gophers who burrough into Kodak’s secret email spamming center to have the name removed. That can take time. But two weeks? That’s silly.