I gave Kristin the ever-so-exciting gift of an external hard drive this year. Basically, she needed a place to store her photos. The market is basically divided into two - fully-assembled drives with fairly nice cases and enclosures you purchase separately and add an IDE or SATA drive. The later is less expensive (since you can pick the drive of your choice, and often find a deal), and more surprisingly offers a much better warranty. Most pre-assembled drives come with a 1 year warranty. However, since the enclosure is relatively inexpensive as compared to the drives, the warranty on that is not as important. Individual drive warranties range from 3 to 5 years, and I chose a Seagate 200GB drive for Kristin's gift, which comes with a generous 5 year warranty.

The trouble is that most enclosures look, or work, like crap. After spending quite a bit of time wading through junk enclosures, I settled on this. So far it seems to work fairly well, but the instructions don't tell you how your hard drive should be configured (slave, not CS or master, seemed to work best for me). Kristin's Powerbook wouldn't format the drive with case-sensitive Mac filesystem, but the default case-insensitive format worked fine. I'm not sure what was going wrong there. 3.5" drives require too much power to run directly from USB (usually), so an external AC adapter is required. This isn't a big deal, since Kristin isn't planning on using it in a portable sense very often. Now I just need to find a decent USB hub for her, as her devices are multiplying.

For Christmas this year I received an iAUDIO X5l [warning: flash] player. It's roughly equivalent to Apple's 30GB model that's capable of playing movies. I'll do a full review later, but so far it's living up to my expectations quite well.

I have three finals in a row: Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of next week (well, it's after 3am, I guess it's technically this week now). At this point I'm looking forward to just not having to study for them any more, and be done. My brain is pretty much fried.

Through the beauty of blosxom plugins, I've added very simple comments to this form. I fully expect that the first non-test post will be some random bot that spams blogs, but I'll keep an eye on it. I hope to integrate it better into my site soon, but I should get to bed.

My latest quest is to find reasonably-priced sodas in 2-liter bottles that use sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup to sweeten them. The best-tasting Coke I've ever had was in Spain (they're 333 ml, which always seemed to go down faster than 12 oz cans, but it's still 11.26 oz). I firmly believe a big part of that was the fact that sugar is used to sweeten it.

Why 2-liter bottles? Here in Michigan, we have a $0.10/container deposit. I, for one, am an avid recycler. This scheme is very inconvenient for a person like me. I like to be rid of my cans as soon as possible, and would prefer not to drag a big bag of containers to the grocery store to get a few bucks off my next purchase. Not only that, but when I buy soda from a vending machine (unfortunately an all-too-often occurrence), there seems to be a total lack of recycling. At UW, there are can recycling containers everywhere. Here, they seem to assume you'll want to carry it home to get your $0.10 back. So to avoid caring about a few dollars in deposits, I buy 2-liter bottles which have just 1 deposit per bottle, and in the process save some money (as they can be had as cheaply as $0.89 including deposit).

I found some nice bottles of soda at Trader Joe's which used sugar, but they were expensive, and the cola variety was too odd-flavored for my taste.

Inspired by The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten, I'm setting out on a quest to overcome some of my food dislikes. When he became the food critic for Vogue, he sought to conquer a large number of his food phobias, with impressive success. More than anything, the best way to go about this is to simply keep trying the foods in question, in moderate doses. His one chapter narrative on the topic also implied another important component: the foods must be prepared well.

I'm a picky eater. I have been as long as I can remember. Over the past five years I've gotten better, or in some cases gained back ground I lost somewhere between 5-10 (like eating green beans and non-trivial amounts of broccoli). I've recently acquired a taste for a small proportion of mushrooms in just about anything tomato-based. For that matter, I went from liking only simple tomato sauces to loving all things cooked tomato (and even small amounts of fresh tomato in things like tacos and nachos).

I'm also not the sort to make New Year's resolutions (at least not in the last several years). I always seem to forget what I've set out to do; convenient, no? However, this year might be different. First of all, I'm starting early. It's only December 4th, after all. Second, my humble list of 5 ingredients come up often as I pass up otherwise-appetizing dishes. Why 5? Certainly achieving my #1 alone would be worth celebrating. I set out 5 hoping to accomplish a few. I like to think of myself as a reasonable person - getting all 5 of these is pretty much out of the question.

On to the list:

• Onions (cooked, in small pieces)
• Red peppers (probably cooked)
• Stir-fried cabbage
• Celery (cooked in some capacity)
• Sweet potatoes

Of these, onions probably affect my life the most. I've come to appreciate their flavor added to things like soups and such, but I still have a hard time with the texture. For a number of reasons, I often blend my salsas, add a can of diced tomatoes, and add some hot sauce. I can sometimes eat onions in soup if they're minuscule and I can get them down without chewing too much. To overcome this aversion I will need to actually buy an onion and use it willingly in recipes. They irritate my eyes, but that's not something that I can change. A whole world of prepared products and improved recipes open up if I can start to accept onions.

I chose red peppers because I love their color, they add useful flavor, and you can find them quite a bit in stir-fries and alongside healthful vegetables to make them more interesting. So far I've only been able to consume tiny amounts of red peppers without cringing in some corn in a random frozen dinner. I'm fairly sure this is one item I'll be able to learn to love, and it'll be a nice colorful addition to lots of recipes.

Stir-fried cabbage is a bit of an oddity. I like cabbage, both in raw form (cole slaw) and in soup. I want to branch out and start to like cabbage in cooked forms in between.

Celery is really not all that nutritionally useful, but it adds flavor to lots of dishes, especially soup. I like being able to make soup of which I'm willing to eat all the bits, so this is one step.

Perhaps the most healthful item on the list, I just haven't been able to get into sweet potatoes. I guess I've always liked potatoes for their relatively neutral flavor to be fixed up with butter, sour cream, bacon, and cheese. The idea of having added items be secondary to a stronger flavor is strange to me. I'm told, though, that they're incredibly healthy, and I certainly need more quality vegetables in my diet.

So that's it. If I'm able to pull off a few of those ingredients, I'll probably be inspired to take down a few more.

So tonight I had a craving for cheesy potatoes. I was close to reaching for a box of dried potatoes with a little packet of powdered cheese that turns into a reasonable approximation of the real thing, but I decided that tonight I would be adventurous and try to make some myself. Without a recipe. Of course, the next time I do it I'll make some adjustments, but it was remarkably decent for a first shot. I should note that in my recipes I try to list the order in which I actually did things, rather than the ideal, so I can keep track in future trials what variables have changed.

I didn't measure most things exactly, so these amounts are approximations from memory (thus, take them with a grain of salt).

Cheddar baked potatoes
Makes about 2-3 servings

1 lb russet potatoes (others might work, I had one giant potato this time)
3-5 oz cheddar cheese, shredded and lightly coated with flour
1-1.5 cup milk (more is probably better here, the sauce should be thinner than I had it)
1/2 teaspoon seasonings (I used seasoned salt, parsley and garlic powder)
hot sauce (I add this at the table)
sour cream (optional, topped at the end).

Pre-heat oven to 350 (I started with 425 but feared burning in my toaster oven). Slice the potatoes and put in a 9x9 glass oven-safe bowl. Add seasonings to the cheese. In a non-stick saucepan, heat the milk and very slowly stir in the cheese. Pour the cheese sauce over the potatoes and even out the mixture. Bake for 15 minutes, stir, bake for 10 minutes more, discover they're still not fully cooked, stir, bake for 10 minutes. I even microwaved them a bit at the end to make sure they were tender. Top with hot sauce and sour cream.

Future alterations: Next time, use more sauce (so the tops of the potatoes don't brown so quickly). Microwave first for a few minutes to start the potatoes cooking a bit to save baking time. Don't stir (enough sauce should keep things from burning).

It occurred to me today that I haven't spent a whole lot of time since moving to Ann Arbor to cook anything new. In an attempt to revive my old habit of trying to cook something neat at least once a week, I cleaned my kitchen today and promptly decided to mess it up again.

Tonight's feature I decided was chicken, but I wanted something crispy without making a giant mess of my toaster oven (which we spent quite a bit of time cleaning today). Usually I take dark meat chicken, brine them, season them lightly, pan fry them quickly, and put them in an oven to finish. This usually works well, except the splatter from the meat can make a mess.

I didn't want to go through the effort of thawing and brining chicken, so I looked to that bag most people seem to have in their freezer of frozen chicken breasts. They're pretty much pre-brined (if you look at the solution they freeze them in), and so long as you don't overcook them they're not half bad. Having a craving for something crispy, however, I turned to my trusty book How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. Some recipes there aren't the greatest, but it is fairly comprehensive as the title implies. I didn't have bread, nor breadcrumbs, nor even croutons (just tossed those a few hours earlier, whoops) to make a coating. I wanted to try something other than flour (which I didn't think would end up that great without deep frying), so I turned to something I wouldn't have thought of without the book: corn meal.

What follows is my own version of crispy chicken. It's really quite healthy, though I could've added some stronger flavors. Next time.

Crispy chicken with corn meal, sauce, over angel hair pasta

2 chicken breasts (thawed), cut into 4 strips
1/2 cup cornmeal (I had yellow)
1/3 pound of angel hair pasta, cooked
1/4 tsp. onion powder
1/4 tsp. garlic powder
3-4 Tbs. olive oil
2 Tbs butter
1/2 cup chicken stock
1 small clove garlic
1 tsp. dried parsley (or equivalent fresh)
salt, pepper to taste

Combine the corn meal, onion powder, and garlic powder in a bowl for dredging. Heat a skillet on medium high with 2 Tbs of the olive oil. Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees. Coat 2 pieces of the chicken in the corn meal mixture and add to the skillet. Cook for about 2-3 minutes, then rotate. After another minute or two, flip. Cook 2-3 minutes or until the pink is gone or nearly gone (it will continue to cook a bit in the oven). After putting them in the oven on a container, repeat with the other 2 pieces of chicken. With chicken removed, add chicken stock and garlic to skillet, scraping off the bottom. Reduce. Add butter and parsley. Top pasta with chicken and pour sauce over it.

In the future this could be improved with greater seasoning, perhaps some vegetables as well (it doesn't have a whole lot of color, except the parsley). The sauce can be made into a cream sauce, which would probably be pretty good.

I made a few small updates to the site. I set up an archive for tips, tricks, fixes etc.. All entries for the year can be accessed as well, thanks to the flexibility of blosxom.

My laptop is up and running at full capacity now. That is, it actually has a functioning hard drive, an operating system that works reliably (Fedora Core 4, actually), etc. I was pondering today the best way to keep share documents between my desktop and workstation. I considered:

• Keeping the files on my file server, which is shared via NFS. This has the advantage of always having the files existing on a RAID 1 setup (mirroring), but two major disadvantages. The first is that my network is 100Mbit, so for large files I would notice a significant slowdown as compared with local disk usage. The second is that it doesn't really fix the problem for my laptop, because when I leave the network I don't want to have to depend on some sort of internet access to retrieve my files.
• Using rsync to copy files back and forth each time I use the laptop. This has the advantage of being fairly simple to implement (a few trivial bash scripts for upload/download sync). However, it would mean that I could only safely change files at one location at a time, which is not an entirely bad assumption. It also risks that I run the wrong rsync script, or forget I made a concurrent change, and that I overwrite new data.
• Use Subversion to manage my documents Subversion (SVN) is a replacement for CVS, and it works really well even for single-user applications. Versioning of my files (basically remembering the differences between each time I "committed" a particular file) would give me the possibility of a number of benefits. I make backups every 5 days, but daily commits could essentially serve as more frequent backups against accidentally deleting a file between normal backups. If I store enough info in the SVN repository, it could work just to back that up, rather than doing the full directory backup I do now, saving multiple copies of the same files (usually 3-8 at once).

At the moment, I'm only keeping current school files within subversion, but if I like it I can migrate all of my documents directory within it. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but the desktop-laptop coordination seemed to make it useful enough to implement now.

Looks like real progress is being made on my power issue. A guy from the power quality department came over today, and said he didn't even need to put an analyzer on the line - it was a "slam dunk" (makes you think of George Tenet, no?). They are going to start by replacing the transformer in our area here. The person indicated that the problem may persist afterwards due to outdated wiring in the area, too. But at least the ball is rolling on some real repairs.

In other news, my power supply fan started making quite a bit of noise. I thought it was my video card acting up again (the noise was consistent with noise it's made before), but a little deduction proved otherwise. I had a spare available, which was good for my sanity's sake.

(updated Oct. 4 to fix link)

For several years I had been mulling over whether to join the Barnes and Noble membership program (I'd offer a link, but it seems to include information specific to my user id). Basically, for $25 a year, you get 10% off purchases at BN brick and mortar stores and online (it used to be 5% online, so this is a decent improvement).

It's a shame that now that I'm living in Ann Arbor, the Borders is much more convenient to go to than the local Barnes and Noble (Borders is, after all, based in Ann Arbor). I still end up buying most of my books online these days, so that's not a huge deal. I guess my other issue is that one must basically obtain a BN membership to bring the prices down to roughly the level that Amazon sells to all US customers (some things are slightly cheaper, some more expensive. BN is rarely cheaper without that 10% discount). Borders, unfortunately, has no real online presence - it's just an entrance to Amazon. So why not just shop at Amazon?

The thing is, I have a lot of issues with the way Amazon is run as a company. Amazon tries to patent anything that might be remotely patentable that the company comes up with. This alone isn't unusual. What's unusual is just how aggressive Amazon has been in the past with its patent portfolio. Many companies use their patent portfolios defensively - to keep other companies from suing them. First, it was Amazon's "one-click" patent; you set up your account info, and after logging in you can purchase things by clicking one button (with the option to cancel the order within a limited amount of time). Does this idea deserve the patent Amazon received? I do not believe so. Amazon famously sued Barnes and Noble for implementing the same feature. Had it been something terribly innovative, I might have agreed, but this seems like a logical extension of the whole online purchasing system. They settled that case in 2002 (no one knows under what terms). I should note, though, that as of today it does not appear that Barnes and Noble offers any equivalent to "one-click" buying. However, Amazon doesn't stop there. Amazon sued the company owning Orbitz, Avis, and others this summer. Perhaps it was a response to being sued a year earlier by the same company Still, it's all very hypocritical given Amazon CEO's statement in 2000 about limiting the number of patents approved and their duration. I should note that the previous three links were from this Slashdot story

But it's not that I'm choosing Barnes and Noble over Amazon just because of what Amazon does. I truly enjoy the Barnes and Noble stores themselves; Borders stores are sometimes a bit cheaper, but they also tend to be smaller (at least in my experience). The website, too, is clean and more focused around books and music than Amazon (which has diversified to just about everything sold by just about everyone).

That said, Barnes and Noble's website has some flaws. I couldn't quickly locate any way to search everything all at once: books, music, etc. Even if I know I want music (and I know I won't get many book results), I can't just use the default search box to search everything. The wish list has a maximum of 25 items, why? Most items have far fewer ratings than Amazon, but the average quality of ratings is decent. Amazon's used seller program is really effective (especially for textbooks), but if BN has an equivalent, it's not as prominently displayed.

So in many ways I've decided to try out the BN way for a while. It shouldn't take too long to get my $25 back, but I may not save enough money as compared to buying everything from Amazon. In large part this depends on whether I buy things retail, which I may be more inclined to do if I get 10% off. There is something wonderful about book shopping in person (one of the few things for which I will shop without the intention of buying right away). I guess I'm hoping that BN will improve its website in the next year or two (unless of course they are restricted by some patent somewhere).

I logged voltages about once a day for a week here, and determined that on average I get a reasonably large voltage drop about 4 times an hour during evening hours (when usage is high here in the complex). Last night, when it was raining (to my surprise), it was actually rather bad. I called up DTE about 8:30p and asked what they could do for me. The lady said she'd send out a tech, but more importantly told me that there is a dept in charge of power quality that I can contact.

So I wait until after midnight (the latest they said a tech might come), and nothing. About an hour after I call my UPS goes off 4 times in 5 minutes (perhaps storm related, but I think all our power problems are exacerbated by overall quality here). So I wake up at 6:30am to take a shower and wait to see if they came early in the morning (like the lady mentioned they might - the window is supposed to be 8 hours). Still nothing. I leave a long explanatory note and go to my classes. Come back, they obviously found no problem (it's cold today, and everyone's at work, so lights don't dim), but they did remove an old connection coming out of the meter (for a dryer that's no longer installed) and said they'd pass along the problem to the power quality department managed above.

Now, at least, I feel like I have the problem with the right people. I'm hoping they are willing to properly diagnose an intermittant problem like mine, and maybe, just maybe, I'll see this resolved at some point in the forseeable future.

Since moving in I've noticed that the quality of my electrical service here is dramatically inferior to what I had in our place in Madison. The basic problem is that even when my own power consumption is steady, my lights occasionally dim briefly. It also happens relatively consistently when my own A/C turns on, but that's more common and harder to justify as a problem worthy of repair.

Basically, my power is affected by my neighbor's usage. I suspect the whole building of 5 or 6 of us, if not the entire complex. During peak energy usage (when everyone has their A/Cs turning on and off), I'll get my lights dimming at least a few times an hour. This is more than just a distraction - it often sets off my UPSes for the computers. That means the voltage drop has to be fairly substantial, even if only for a brief time.

Of course, by the time I realized what was probably going on, it was a busy move-in time for the landlord. Thus it took a long time for them to come out the first time to look at it. They opened the circuit breaker, made sure things weren't loose, and told me to call them if it kept happening (I was 95% sure it would). At this point I didn't know if my neighbors were experiencing anything. Sure enough, it kept happening, and I called back. The next time someone came out I wasn't home. I got a note saying that when the A/C turns on, dimming is normal. I realized my mistake: I kept bringing up my own A/C because it was a reliable way of reproducing the problem (and a well-wired building shouldn't have an A/C dim lights either). So I then had to make it explicitly clear that my own A/C could be off, along with the dishwasher, garbage disposal, bathroom fan, washer/dryer, and any other possibly malfunctioning culprits.

I had also made the mistake of assuming that it was the landlord's job of communicating with the power company; after all, if the power company really has to make repairs, it was not on property to which I had authorization. It turns out the power company will deal very little with landlords but respond tremendously quickly to tenant calls. They own the meter box, everything after it is the tenant/landlord's problem, and if the problem is before it they get to work things out, I imagine.

Anyway, the first day we called they sent someone within 8 hours, but we weren't home (it was 9pm), and they didn't know how to get to the back yard. I called back the next day, and a lady was out here within 4 hours. I've got to hand it to power companies, they take all service calls pretty seriously. Of course, it happened to be the coldest day in weeks. It was last Friday at about 1pm, so most of my neighbor's were gone, and power consumption was nil. Even turning on my own A/C wouldn't dim the lights. The service call wasn't completely wasted. It turns out that during about a 6 month "storm season", DTE caps energy usage by area to prevent widespread brownouts. We're obviously near our limit in this area (I have no idea how large of an area is under a single cap). DTE won't do anything about it unless our voltage drops below 114 (it only got down to 118 on that cold day).

I considered this largely good news. One, I knew that moving wouldn't be an answer, because I might get stuck with this problem anywhere. Two, even if nothing ever got "fixed", the problem would go away within a month or two for the rest of winter (I suspected this anyway, but didn't think it would be because of any cap removal, simply because of lower power consumption - we have gas heat here). Third, I have a voltage # to check for myself. I asked about the severity of the problem - did it warrant a call after hours to DTE? It turns out it does. I also learned they wouldn't put a logging analyzer on my meter. That probably stems from the fact that they'd rather not look too hard for problems. She also didn't test the voltage during the period I turned on the A/C, which was pretty disconcerting. However, the 114 number is sufficiently high that I think under high energy usage we may come just underneath it. If not, I can invest in a UPS that will log to my computer its input voltage, and use that as my evidence to go back to DTE.

It took about a month, but I'm finally putting this site online. It's been here all along, but my index page was just a placeholder since bringing it online, so even the search engines weren't indexing anything. The final piece involved cleaning up my ugly bookmarks collection into something slightly less ugly (though still fairly unwieldy). At some point I'll probably script the bookmarks to html to links.xhtml process (konqueror does the first transition decently itself, but I have to replace "separator" links with hr tags). Maybe now I'll keep my bookmarks more organized. Probably not.

I've been managing to do a little work on this page in between keeping up with the news (thoroughly depressing) and playing a few games (sometimes depressing, given my luck recently). I'm pretty much done tweaking the layout, which is proving an interesting lesson in CSS. For example, you can't put a div tag inside of an a tag and still have the CSS validate (though the browser does exactly what you want - whatever box you drew with CSS becomes a link). Thus, the buttons on the left are not buttons so much as bordered links. There are ways around this, but I had difficulty getting their appearance consistent. I'll leave it for now.

Until next time.

I was using portsentry to monitor a variety of ports, which messes up imapd-ssl with the following error message:

imapd-ssl: pmap_getmaps rpc problem: RPC: Unable to receive; errno = Connection reset by peer

No obvious solution was available via a few Google searches, so I did a little trial and error to determine that port 111 was the culprit. Things look okay now. Just one of many little fixes I'd rather not have to re-learn in the future.

(edits made on Aug 21)

I think I spent more money on textbooks this semester than I did for any given two semesters as an undergrad. It would seem that for a plethora of reasons that grad textbooks are very rarely below $50 each, even when obtaining them on the cheap from random places on the web. I avoid the international edition, not because they aren't supposed to be re-imported (as I understand it, SCOTUS ruled in 1998 that publishing companies can't forbid the re-importation on copyright grounds), but because the printing quality is crap. I hope these books are good, because the hardcover versions are not cheap. Watch me not end up using at least one or two of them (I have five total, with a read on the way).

Anyway, this past week I finished reading The Founding Brothers an interesting non-fiction work about a few key bits of history around the American Revolution. The most important message I got from the book was just how divisive politics were back then (as now), and not the cohesive everybody-hold-hands history we're taught in middle school.

I'm also nearly finished with The 9/11 Commission Report. I know, I know, I'm about a year late, but it's a dense read. I thought it was interesting that if the U.S. government had publicized that Moussaui was in custody, the attacks would've probably been called off (or at least delayed). That and a whole host of other missed opportunities to deal with Al Qaeda (or Al Qida, depending on your Romanization of the word).

I haven't finished the layout of this site yet, and I fear with class starting on Monday it may take some time before I do.

So I'm trying to get some semblance of a web site up here. Once again, the techniques of web design are coming back to haunt me. This time I'm trying to do things as correctly as possible, using CSS when possible (more on that below), and trying to design a site that is both easy to update and easy to expand. In large part the site is just as much for me; I hope to create a centralized location for things I've found interesting or useful in the past. I'm often too lazy to take note of a solution to a problem and end up having to go back and figure it out again later.

The majority of the content on the site is generated with the ultra-simple weblog software called blosxom (pronounced "blossom"). I like the aspect of a very basic core that's expandable with plugins.

I had hoped to use CSS to layout the vast majority of style elements on this site. The first obstacle in my path was my own lack of knowledge about CSS (and what appears to be an annoying bug in the CSS editor of my software). The second was browser compatibility. Using CSS for all layout is useful if you want to use some of its more advanced features, but browsers like IE 6 (and especially IE 5) will not support it. Thus you're relegated to using much more basic functionality, and then you might as well use more compatible tables. For the purposes of this site, the division between the navigation bar and content is done with a very simple table. I had the CSS version of that layout almost perfected (overcoming the first reason not to use CSS above), but it pretty much failed miserably under a browser like IE 5 on Mac.

At this point I hope to simply reduce the styling on each page by using CSS. For example, the simplistic title bar is styled with CSS.