Absurd Singularity

After last week's simple udon recipe, this week's recipe #4 is even easier, requiring just a toaster.

Not too tough to toast a piece of bread, slather it with mayo and layer a couple of slices of tomato on top. I did it w/a slice of tofu bread and Kewpie lite. The mayo and tomato makes a nice combo and I like the taste but as with last week's recipe, not particularly filling.

So for my second slice I added a couple of slices of prosciutto that I had lying around in the fridge. Could also make do with ham (or any other sliced meat of choice). Prosciutto may be wasted on this particular recipe though since the mayo tends to dominate the distinctive prosciutto taste. Anyway, final score for the original recipe: 6 out of 10.

Well this project is taking a lot longer than I originally was planning. Blame it on my well developed sense of procrastination. =p But anyway, after an almost 2 year hiatus, I'm back with Vamp-sama's recipe #3.

This particular recipe is definitely super easy. Doesn't even need the use of fire, just a microwave. For awhile I was hesitant to try it because I'm not a fan of raw egg. I know the idea is that the egg gets "cooked" a little bit when it comes in contact with the noodle when you're mixing everything together but since you don't really need to heat the udon up all that much, you're still pretty much eating raw egg. The only other issue I had when throwing this together is that I didn't defrost the udon noodles enough before microwaving them. So the udon was still stuck together afterwards and broke apart into chunks instead of individual strands.

When everything's mixed up together, it's actually not that bad. I over-soy sauced it this time so it came out a little saltier than I like but otherwise it's pretty good. The only other problem with this particular dish is that one package of udon is pretty damn little, especially for an American-sized appetite. And with the lack of anything really of substance to it, it doesn't do very much to satiate hunger. But I guess you can't really beat it in terms of simplicity and low cost. Final score, 6 out of 10.

Long time readers (if there are any left ;-p) will know that I'm a fairly extensive user of Apple products. So when the iPhone 5 officially opened up for preorder, I woke up at 3am just so I could place mine (64GB black AT&T).

Flash forward a week when the iPhone 5 is due to be delivered. I was home that day but UPS was tricky and showed up in the morning when I was out taking my kid to school instead of their usual afternoon time. So yeah, annoyed already. But, I do what I usually do when I miss an UPS shipment: call them up and tell them to hold it for me at the local distrib center (which is about a 15 min drive away). Their nightly pickup times are from 8:30 to 9:30pm. Figuring it'd be a busy evening for them, I show up at 8:00pm to an already lengthy line. It got to be my turn at a little after 9pm. Surprise, surprise, my package can't be found. Guy at counter says possibly the driver for my area hasn't come back yet and to just wait around. So that's what I do. About a half hour later, while I'm staring a hole into the counter guy's head, he updates me, "Well the driver did seem to have already been back but we still have no idea where your package is." Hrrrgghh.... But he does give my package info to their iPhone runner (just a guy who's sole purpose that night was to run around the center tracking down iPhone packages) and the wait continued. Another half hour goes by before the runner comes back and YAY, he has my package!

So I hightail it home since it's already been TWO HOURS that I've wasted on what should have been at most a half hour wait. At home, I open up the shipping box and pause for a bit when confronted with a white iPhone 5 box. Heart sinking, I flip the box around and yup, 16GB white iPhone 5. Frack. Double check the model and serial # on the shipping box with the ones on the iPhone 5 box. Didn't match. Double frack. WTF do I do now? Decided to give Apple customer service a call. "Sorry, due to extremely high call volume, blah blah blah. Try calling back later." *click* *dial tone*

So, iPhone 5 launch day BIG FAIL!

Continue reading "My iPhone 5 Fiasco" »

So, at pretty much the very last month of the year, my better half decided that a trip would be required to end the year with a bang! After a few days of frantic scouring of travel sites, an itinerary was procured for the entire family, grandparents included. We would basically be flying out right after Christmas and spend 3 days in San Diego and 3 days in LA with an extra day capping both ends lost to travel time. This was not exactly the best laid of plans. To begin with, airfare is astronomical around that time of the year. Even more so when you're booking less than a month out. =p And it turned out to be pretty much the most annoyingly eventful "vacation" I've ever been on. What happened? I will proceed from the beginning and start with the bad stuff:

Continue reading "Journey to the Left Coast" »

Cailyn originally had a tentative birth date of June 13. June 15th if we went by her ultrasound checks. We were expecting her to be early since we kept hearing that later children often arrive earlier than the first. But like her brother, she wasn't quite ready to make her début yet. ;-p Erin's doctor was all ready to send us to the hospital to be induced on the 13th because apparently Erin was already about 4cm dilated since the weekend. But Erin, having not exactly the most painless of births the first time around, wasn't exactly gung-ho about the idea. So we waited a couple of more days to see if Cailyn would be willing to come on her own.

Erin had another morning checkup with her doctor on the 16th and not much had changed. Erin had the odd contraction every now and then but nothing imminent. Tired of the waiting, we agreed to head over to the hospital for induction. Checked in at a bit after noon. Not much seems to have changed at Hackensack University Medical Center which is good cause it was already pretty nice to begin with. Because Erin was already semi-dilated, they just started her off with oxytocin. Erin had a different doctor this time because the one that delivered Devon retired from obstetrics after Devon was born. So this new doctor was much more lenient in the use of Epidural and basically said Erin could get it whenever she wanted to. Which was music to her ears and she got it done a few hours into things when she felt she didn't want to have to deal with the pain anymore.

About 5 hours after we had checked in, the nurse checked the dilation, said it was about time and went to get the doctor. Once the doctor came, the entire birthing procedure was a lot more relaxed and quicker this time around. It was just the doctor, nurse and me. I had to help again with pushing her left leg out and keeping her head up during the pushing. But it seemed a little unusual because we would just make small talk while waiting for each wave of contractions to begin. And since there was no pain, there wasn't any screaming. =p So overall, very quiet and low key. I think it was on the 4th or 5th wave (3 pushes each wave) that Cailyn decided to show herself.

Despite the much quicker and easier procedure this time, birthing still remains a rather bloody and messy process. =p I think obstetricians get a kick out of getting the fathers to look at what's going on during the delivery. "Look, look, she's got a lot of hair!" "Good job, look! Her head is out!" As I noted in a tweet afterwards:

And it really is. The miracle of childbirth will never cease to amaze (and scare the hell outta) me. ;-p Come to think of it, I don't understand why anyone would want to film their kid's birth. Seriously, no one wants to watch that. =p

Anyway, thankfully, everything has proceeded as well as can be so far since then. Devon looooves his little sister and if he shows any jealousy to the attention that she gets from us, he at least doesn't take it out on her. Grandpa's got a couple of new bruises though. ;-p The two siblings do look remarkably alike as babies though. I assume that will change when she grows. One difference that was very apparent though since Cailyn first emerged is that she has my bone structure while Devon is more like Erin's. She has really delicate and long limbs and fingers and just might wind up being taller than Devon in the future. She's relatively low maintenance for a baby right now, crying only when she's hungry or needs a change. Nothing has really upset her yet to the point where she would cry for longer than a few minutes. But we're all happy to finally have her in our family. =)

For pretty much the last decade my main computer has been a laptop, starting from the gorgeous Powerbook G3 Wallstreet, through the titanium Powerbook G4s, and then the aluminum and unibody Macbook Pros. I pretty much figured that I was done with owning Mac desktops as the computing power of laptops seemed to be sufficient for my use and I placed more value in the portability of laptops. That is until I purchased a Nehalem Mac Pro in September of 2009.

Since the Mac Pro requires no small financial commitment, my initial hard drive configuration for it consisted of one Hitachi 7200RPM 1TB drive. To that I added a Western Digital 10,000RPM 300GB Velociraptor and a Western Digital 5400RPM 1TB Caviar Green drive. The Velociraptor was partitioned in two and served as my boot drive; half went to MacOS X, the other to a BootCamped Windows 7. The faster 1TB drive was my main data drive and the green drive served as my Time Machine backup.

My price trigger when it comes to purchasing backup hard drives is $100. At the time of the Mac Pro purchase, that price slot was taken up by 1TB drives. When 1.5TB drives slipped below the $100 line, I bought one to use as a new Time Machine backup drive. At that point, all four of the Mac Pro's internal 3.5" hard drive bays were filled. I then replaced the 1TB data drive with a Seagate 7200RPM 2TB drive as I discovered 1TB wasn't quite enough to cover a year's worth photo & video. This setup worked quite well and remained unchanged until recently when I decided that it was time to bring a SSD into the fold.

I've been using a 128GB SSD in my unibody MacBook Pro since early 2009 so I was well acquainted with the speed advantages. I was hoping that waiting another year+ would bring prices down but alas, that was not to be. The SSDs have gotten incrementally better but they're still locked in to the same price slots as before. The other issue was also where to install the SSD as all the internal bays were full. To that end I had been keeping an eye on the OWC Multi-Mount solution which provides brackets that allows you install combinations of 2.5" or 3.5" drives in the usually free second 5.25" bay that's situated under the optical Superdrive. So my grandiose plan was to pick up a Multi-Mount along with their 120GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD and pair my existing Velociraptor to it. The SSD would become my sole MacOS X boot disc and the Velociraptor would be dedicated to Windows. I would also add a new 2TB Caviar Green drive to use as my Time Machine backup since that had also recently slipped under the $100 mark.

However, I forgot about one thing: there was only one free SATA port internally. I needed two. The 2009 Mac Pro comes with 6 bays: 2x 5.25" and 4x 3.5", and it has one SATA connection for each bay only. I suppose I could have followed the same route that I had done with my MacBook Pro and removed the SuperDrive but I really didn't want to have to do that. And oddly enough, OWC doesn't have an existing solution to this issue. I chatted with their tech support and the only solution they could come up with was the rather expensive Sonnet Tempo SATA E4i PCI-e card that adds four internal SATA ports. However, besides the price, another issue killed this option dead: namely that hard drives connected via this card are not bootable.

So, I dug around some more on the Interwebs and discovered MaxUpgrades and their MaxConnect system. The MaxConnect system allows you to install up to four 2.5" drives in one of the 5.25" bays. The bracket it comes with isn't as nice-looking or as flexible as the Multi-Mount solution as it only fits 2.5" drives while the Multi-Mount can take either 3.5" or 2.5". But if you're only looking to add two 2.5" drives, the MaxConnect system also comes with a 2-port "bootable" SATA PCI-e card along with the requisite cables to get everything attached and running. Plus the price was quite reasonable. I first contacted them to see if they by any chance were willing to sell just the PCI-e card and cables since I didn't need the bracket but the answer was "no." So I bit the bullet and bought the set.

Continue reading "Drives, Drives, and More Drives" »

As I mentioned in my previous post on smartphone-compatible gloves, I had ordered one of the new iPhone Glove by Dots Gloves which was backordered for a couple of weeks. Surprisingly it showed up quicker than I was expecting so I got to try it out for the past two weeks in this wonderful NYC winter weather. =p

This new lambswool style feels a bit thicker and stiffer than the old knit version that I previously had. Might soften up after age and more frequent use. Something I noticed immediately was that it felt snugger in the fingers than before. Also, there seemed to be a good amount of extraneous thread and knit inside that my fingers would keep getting snagged on when putting them on. So I turned them inside out to check it out.

What you're seeing in the photo above is the point where the palm and fingers connect. Not having owned wool gloves before, I'm not sure if this is normal with them or not but you can see the one big red loop in the center and two smaller silver loops to each side. And if you look closely you can see two thin red threads running horizontally across along the top underneath the loops. These were what my fingers were encountering whenever I put the gloves on. I wound up yanking the thin red threads out but left the loops all in. Overall it seems like rather shoddy handiwork to me but as I said, I have no other similar gloves to compare them with. Plus, once you get past this, it doesn't affect the overall utility of these gloves.

So, how do these gloves work? Basically the same premise as the Agloves. Silver coated fibers act as conductors between your flesh and the touchscreen. The difference here is that they only weave these fibers in to 3 fingers on each hand (thumb, index, middle) instead of throughout the glove as with the Agloves. As can be seen in the photo above, the silver threads seem kind of sparse compared to the Agloves but they work all the same. Because it's a much thicker glove though, response time seems to be a bit slower and precision takes a hit as well. Still able to work with a touchscreen quicker than the old metal dot version though but not as nimble as with the Agloves.

The one advantage that it has over its predecessor and the Agloves is that it's quite warm. Provides excellent protection against the cold. So when it hit sub-30 degree (Fahrenheit) temps here, these are the gloves I pull out first. So, as predicted, these new Dots Gloves have replaced the old ones as my go-to really cold weather gloves. The Agloves is still champs when it comes to responsiveness and precision but these new Dots Gloves are a good compromise between cold protection and utility.

After last week's successful attempt at Vamp-sama's Simple Tarako Spaghetti, I got ready for recipe #2.

Now this one I wasn't looking forward to at all. I'm not a fan of kimchi for starters. And I'm even less of a fan of jyako. But we always have a package or two of jyako in our fridge since Erin loves frying them up with some scrambled eggs as a calcium supplement for Devon. So I bit the bullet and bought a small jar of kimchi from Mitsuwa. The plan was to just make a small portion in case it was as un-palatable as I was expecting. I do love sesame oil though so it at least had that going for it. ;-p

Pretty much zero preparation is needed for this dish. Frying up the jyako in the sesame oil was heavenly (again, LOOOVE sesame oil) and then dumped in the kimchi. Stir fried in our little wok for a few minutes before dumping in some water. I think adding enough water to cover the kimchi is way too much water so next time I'll be adding much less.

As for the final result... Surprisingly, this dish was really good. Goes awesome with plain rice. Couldn't believe it. Polished off the entire portion I had made and was left wanting more. I think if you wanted to meat it up a bit you could probably throw in some thin pieces of pork instead of or in addition to the jyako. But yeah, I was pleasantly surprised at how nicely this one turned out. Final verdict, an 8 out of 10. =)