Dammit Delevi!

Lights

I once had a fluorescent light fixture in my kitchen. It crossed me one too many times… so I removed it from existence.

What was beneath...

I was less than pleased to find out that the people that put it up had not only neglected to paint under the unit, but had also painted up to it more than once, leaving me with a nice ring of paint. The removal of the drywall anchors had also left some holes.

So then there was spackle.

Fun with spackle

Along the way, I learned about painting, color matching, etc.

Painted!

And then came the installation (This is where having an electrician for a father comes in really handy — having someone with 30+ years of experience to call is really awesome. Thanks, Dad!) – it went mostly as planned, with two trips to home depot for the little things I didn’t think about.

Done!

From start to finish, the entire process took about 10 hours — with most of that spent waiting for things to dry. I’m pretty happy with the results.

Notice none of the pictures actually show you what the rest of the kitchen looks like. That’s because it’s a disaster.

Now to clean…

Chili Mac, or “Doin’ it wrong”

Nom nom nom. It’s been too long since I’ve really cooked. I broke down and bought a crock pot and some other kitchen equipment and made this. It’s my answer to Steak N’ Shake’s Chili 5-way.

I started with a Chili recipe from About.com “Easy Chili”… and then modified it:

• 1lb ground round (85%) (cooked with olive oil, 1/2 clove garlic, and 1/2 cup onions, exclusive of the rest of the ingredients)
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 1 clove garlic
• 28 ounces of canned tomato (even split of stewed/diced)
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1-2 teaspoons chili powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/8th teaspoon pepper

… and then… I threw in:

• 1 box of macaroni pasta
• 1 jar of spaghetti sauce (Paul Newman’s)
• ~2 tbsp Sri Racha chili sauce
• 8oz sliced mushrooms
• 1.5 cups of chopped onion

I actually added about 3 cups of water over the course of the cooking, and upped the spices to compensate. I didn’t want to, but it was very dry — and then I remembered the tomato sauce and felt really, really dumb.

Either way, having thrown it all into a crock pot (No, I didn’t cook the pasta first, and yes, it did come out nicely) somewhere around 2.5 hours later, I got a tasty, tasty bowl of Chili Mac.

Nom.

Yes, you, Chicago.

Sometimes it’s nice to get out of your comfort zone and into someone else’s.

I crashed with a friend at her apartment in Chicago – I’ve lived here for 12 years, and I’m still surprised at how different the suburbs are from the city. I don’t spend much time here because work keeps me relatively far from the city, but I still enjoy this place.

It’s cold outside. I think that the cold makes this place, as does the heat. It’s rarely ever just nice to be outside – at least in my opinion, but inconvenience makes me remember how much we value the conveniences I do have.

I pondered (as many have, i’m sure) as I wrote – why would anyone choose this place to live in? Everyone complains about the weather and the things wrong with this place – and they’re right. And still they’re here.

Despite the weather, and the problems, Chicago remains a distinctly beautiful place. Maybe i’m a fanboy. I think there’s more to it than that. Maybe I’m wrong. I have a feeling I’m not the only one.

Blogging at 30,000 feet

It’s a new experience. I IM’d a frend of mine, who blinked at me like I’d just discovered ice cream or something.

Maybe I’m just old. Maybe I’ve not lost the wonderment associated with air travel, new technology, or maybe I’m just a geek. I’m blogging about airplane wifi. I’m a geek.

I’m okay with this.

Beyond the cool tech, I’m excited to visit my friends in Seattle, and I’m looking forward to the good times to follow. The week that led up to this point saw me getting done the things I really wanted to – the top of the list (other than the flight) was the removal of the ATI video card from my life. No more.

Seatttleee..

Now… I wonder if I can get WoW on this thing..

Post-AMD ATI.. part 2

ATI Really likes to advertise to me. Not only did they advertise games to me during the driver installation.. They advertise to me in the CCC application.

Upon launching the CCC (Catalyst Control Center), I see this:

REALLY?

This looks like a popup. It’s not a popup. It’s the application. It’s what you get when you double-click on the tray icon. Unchecking the “show this page on startup” doesn’t seem to do anything. I can only assume that on my next reboot, this would have annoyed me. Also, unchecking “Allow Web Content” doesn’t seem to get rid of this advert.

Note that the actual functionality of the application is in the “Graphics” and “options” dropdown menus:

I feel a lot like I’ve just paid $300 to install advertising software in my computer. Why, ATI, why?

Note that at this point, I don’t care about the contents of the application, I no longer even want to open it. I would uninstall it if it were possible.

If I didn’t need this card, I would return this to the store right now to remove the evil from my system. If I can get into an Nvidia card before the return window expires… I might.

And then it rained.

Sometimes, I’m struck by the fail in my life. Some of it is correctable, and innocent, and some of it is not.

I shipped a friend of mine a video card – next day – to replace his failed card. It arrived exactly as prescribed, only they didn’t leave it at his place, instead (as makes sense) opting to retry delivery later… The story goes on from there, but it was a mess.

Separately, I ordered a new graphics card from Amazon, which I expected to find delivered at my home when I arrived there. Sadly, Amazon failed to provide Fedex with the package on time, so my shipment was delayed. I ended up telling them to go pound sand and driving to my friendly neighborhood computer store, which is less friendly and less neighborhood than I might like. I did eventually get my graphics card.

So now I begin the empirical evaluation of my Radeon HD 5850 – it being the replacement for my 9800GTX. I’ve been an nVidia guy for a long time, and probably will be after this exercise is over… but we’ll see. My last ATI card was from 2004, and I was not impressed. Since then, AMD has bought them out, and one would hope they’ve learned something.

So far, I have one gripe. Bloat. Their drivers left me with 3 entries in my windows 7 start menu – the first thing I saw was an ATI Icon, which.. was followed by two more, in addition to the expected start menu drivel.

Really, I just paid you $300 for this damned thing. I don’t need you trying to sell me on LOTR online or your marketing spam.

C’mon. Keep this up and I’ll actually look forward to replacing this card with some kind of nVidia GF104 derivative.

Incidental

On my way in to work, I swung by Subway for breakfast – a new thing for me.
English muffin, sausage, pepper jack, onions, and green pepper. Tasty and grease free (and free of cost, today). Nom nom.

I continue to enjoy the scenery at my job. Someone once described it as looking like the village in “Lost”. That may be the simplest description. When you drive in, you are greeted by guards, whose presence belie the nature of the place, and that of people who work there.

I frequently find myself thinking of the many beauties of this place – more than the obvious greenery and buildings. I am taken with the difference between this place and my last, and hope that this place remains as it is, and that my feelings toward it remain as they are now.

Breaking Records

I spent some time chatting with a friend, and reading over my blog, prompted by comments on Chai Lattes and cats in toilets.

I’m out of a job – by my own will – and I’ve been talking to others who find themselves similarly unemployed, and I realize that this state is common. None of the people I’ve spoken to, myself included, genuinely like it, however.

I’m looking at the next stage of my career and my life, and making it my goal to join the Air Force. Not only because it’s truly beneficial to me, but because really, I can fight and make money in many different places, but something worth fighting for is much harder to come by. One of my good friends pointed out that military service is Honorable.

Honor. I think I like this concept.

Morning, done early.

Morning found me at 1 o’clock, and after some deliberation, I decided that I was in fact going to embrace it.

Much to my delight, I found one of my oldest friends on facebook, and managed to chat her up for a while about the … alternative sleep schedule we’d managed to find ourselves in, and the variety of caffeine we’d chosen to procure, and things of that nature. My first attempt at a homebrew chai latte went fairly well. I will make Starbucks squirm.. eventually.

While i’m sipping my latte, i’m contemplating the rest of my day, and the rest of my week. I’m moving offices today, and meeting my new boss. I’m looking forward to meeting him, and finding out what kind of a man he is.

Further on down, I have the yearly company holiday party, at District Bar in Chicago. I’ve managed to steal a friend of mine for the evening – I have a feeling that by Friday, we’ll both be up for the open bar. Should be a good time.

I think I like this morning thing. Having a little time to sit and drink my tea is a good thing.

Windows 7

Rocks. So far.

The first thing I noticed was that all of the hardware that I cared about worked out of the box (somewhat expected, but still good) – dual displays. check. sound. check.

Still more impressive was the fact that upon downloading and installing my graphics drivers, I was not prompted to reboot. At all. I was actually dropped out to text mode for a split second and the monitor blanked and flashed a few times, and I came back up with the installation complete.

Would I have been less impressed if this hadn’t happened? No. Frankly, I never expected MS to care.

Nice work, MS. Very nice.

The default desktop was clean. I was impressed with the default background. It added to the overal feeling of clean on the system.

My initial impressions of the start menu/taskbar rewrite can be summed up in one word: Nice. Anything I’d normally put on the desktop, including the recycle bin (If I ever used the thing, I’d leave it on the desktop – the right click menu doesn’t work quite like I want it to – if I could get the proper context menu when I right clicked, instead of, or in addition to, the windows explorer “You put something inside this popup menu” context menu, this would be the -perfect- feature) is now on it’s own nice, neat little popup menu. Think OS X. It’s kinda like that.

One word for the windows 7 desktop: clean.

Installation of my apps (Firefox, Pidgin to start) went cleanly, and more or less 100% as expected. Some very small graphical glitches with pidgin, but nothing TOO obnoxious.

The UAC Improvements went largely unnoticed for me – I’ve been using Vista since not long after it came out, so I’m used to it. I think it functions appropriately considering what it’s supposed to be doing for you. Meh. *shrug*

One thing that i’ve noticed – things that would normally pop up and annoy me (such as the firefox “Downloads” window are conspiciously absent. They remain in the dock. I might like this. We’ll see.

It’s at this point that i’ll mention my first hiccup with Windows 7, because this is where everything just started to suck. Technical and detailed, I know.

I decided to install iTunes 64bit – this may have been a bad idea. Before the install really started, it essentially locked up my computer – first completely, for a few seconds, and then it caused some kind of  issue where explorer would chew up all available resources, and I was unable to get the installer to even start again. I was met with the same issue with the 32-bit version.

After some playing around, I was able to get it to install by running the installer as administrator and choosing Vista SP2 compatibility mode. Fun times had by all.

After the installation, my iPhone was detected correctly, and the application did work as expected, however, there were some audio skips, and a quick check confirmed that a decent amount of CPU was in use, possibly enough to cause the chopping. Why that’s the case when I have firefox, pidgin, and iTunes open (and not doing anything TOO demanding with any of them, as far as I know) I can’t tell yet. Maybe it’s time to pick up a quad core. I hate that logic, but maybe.

While I was ready to post glowing reviews of Win7, I’m not quite so sure anymore. This will be my first 64 bit instance of windows, and i’m not sure how much of my issues are due to the fact that this IS a 64-bit OS, and the rest of the world doesn’t quite have their head attached correctly when it comes to 64-bit.

Is Windows 7 the shizzle? No.

Is Windows 7 good? Maybe.

Is Windows 7 better than Vista? Maybe.

Expect to hear from me again.