So I broke in our new charcoal grill last night night-before-last with pretty decent success. I forgot how much more challenging charcoal is versus gas (sadly they don’t allow gas on our balcony). Did a thin beef cut with corn (and warmed up some sausages on the side). Its going to take a bit of practice to master how to keep things from burning at the onset and how to keep the coals hot for longer cooking excursions....
Personally, I think the entire cast of Firefly/Serenity is under appreciated. Nathan has the biggest potential, but as this comment displays, Alan is probably the most versatile, and I completely agree with the sentiment. I haven’t seen 3:10 to Yuma yet, but it has received some great press and reviews. He is the unsung hero that everyone loves. I also picked up the collectors edition of Serenity last weekend. There are a few extra bonus features and an extra commentary track, but really its supporting the franchise in hope of seeing a Serenity 2....
(Note: I’m cleaning out some topics I wanted to get to… so these aren’t necessarily timely thoughts I’m exposing here. This trend will probably continue until I actually get caught up.) It literally is amazing how far Microsoft has sunk under its own weight. I know there have been a lot of examples of late to choose from, but this struck me as particularly appalling. The fact that Microsoft’s attempt at standardizing this crap has met with significant resistance is really a testament to how low they have sunk (and how often of late they have resorted to this sort of thing)....
Last week the Air Force transitioned to the new AEP ground station software that I had been working on at Lockheed for the last 4 years. The transition went smoothly which is really a testament to everyone that slaved away to make sure everything worked. And this really was hard… the tried and true analogy being its like changing the engine when the car is doing 60mph down the highway. You had to be absolutely sure you weren’t breaking the system or degrading the accuracy because so many critical systems (both military and civilian) depended on it....
…this is incredibly impressive.
This weekend was quite literally a gut check. Summarized in spectacular powerpoint fashion… Microsoft Vista is quite possibly the worst f*cking software ever written. Ever. Period. End of Story. Weekend-long pounding stress headaches suck. SUCK SUCK SUCK. Building a computer from scratch got a lot more complicated in 8 years. Building a computer with a pounding stress headache is a fracking awful. Hard drives arriving DOA (complete with that sickening head clicking) SUCK....
Maybe its the way I’m wired… I don’t know if others feel this way. Images this beautiful make me choke up… just imaging being in an expanse of space where I could look and see something like this larger than life… and why I’m so disappointed that unless some really weird quirk is discovered in physics… humans aren’t meant to voyage very far into space… They are only meant to see things of great beauty from afar....
A virtual unknown here in the States, Nightwish is a huge act in Europe. Hailing from Finland, their first singer gave them a very unique sound – a very operatic voice prevented them sounding like Evanescence (even though they predated the US act by almost a decade). Tarja Turunen was quite literally an opera singer fronting a heavy metal band. They split ways two years ago due to creative differences, and Nightwish spent a year and a half looking for a new female front (wo)man....
oh… my… $DEITY This post is more a laundry list of this past weekend, but ugh… totally nuts. Thursday (55 miles driven + commute) Finish up work and then take a load of stuff over to the Stanford apartment (Abrams). Drive both cars up to Lafayette, and get in late enough that we really didn’t get any of the packing we needed to get done. Friday (212 miles driven) Pick up the uhaul at 7:30am (ugh) and start the 3D Tetris puzzle....
We just need to get through this weekend… We took keys to our new apartment on campus on Tuesday. Definitely a rollercoaster ride though. We had called the housing office last week and they said our apartment was in this other highrise that wasn’t mentioned as a couples housing location, so we were concerned we were just going to get stuck with a bunch of underclassmen (no offense). It also wasn’t a building that had a balcony and was even smaller than the other floor plans (if that was even possible)....