H-Mart

(March 11)

For anyone who has experienced the thrills of shopping in large Korean groceries (basement levels of department stores), H-Mart should feel very familiar.  And when a branch opened in Burlington a few years back, it drew instant crowds and has caused the demise of some small Mom and Pop grocery businesses in the region.  H-Mart can't be beat for its selection, yet, and that's what it's all about.

Every time we go to H-Mart, I need to come away with some fun product I haven't tried before, and today's choice was the Japanese "Couque D'asses."  The cookies are much tastier than the name might suggest, and I direct you to this most excellent anal-ysis.

One thing I did notice right away was that the package described the cookies as "langue de chat," or cat's tongues, so I was compelled to find out what those were.  Traditionally, they are oval shaped biscuits, pretty much like one half of a Pepperidge Farms Milano, without the chocolate.  And yes, Couque D'asses are not far from Milanos.

(March 12)

Angelica and I had a rare shared ramen meal today, which consisted of another find from yesterday's shopping trip: Shin Ramyun Black.  Touted to be a "premium" ramen, our take on it is that we like the original Shin Ramyun better.  I think Shin Ramyun Black has a richer and smoother flavor with less heat, and this may in fact appeal to a wider audience; but for those who were raised on original Shin Ramyun, this new stuff is probably not a winner.

Simulation at the O.K. Corral

(March 10)

What are the odds that this existence as we know it is one complex simulation?  On December 21, will our Earthbound simulation come down for "scheduled maintenance" and "upgrade"?

A lot of my favorite sci-fi deals with this premise.  Of course, there is the quintessential Matrix trilogy, but there are abundant other offerings to explore.  I'd recommend books such as Neuromancer and Snow Crash, films such as Tron and The Thirteenth Floor, and in the television category, any episodes of Star Trek: TNG that center on the holodeck are fun to watch.  Later this year, I should get to watch some of those episodes again, but at the pace I am going right now, I don't know...

Well, this is a great segue into the Star Trek episode "Spectre of the Gun."  Kirk and his gang of boys end up "imprisoned" in what turns out later to be a simulation of Tombstone, Arizona on October 26, 1881.  The Enterprise guys are baffled that they cannot convince the townsfolk (or the Earps) that they are in fact not the outlaw Clanton gang, and quickly realize that this is the day that several of the gang are meant to be killed in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.  It's Spock who eventually realizes the illusion of the reality around them, and, in a very Matrix-like turn, that the bullets can only harm them in their minds.

This episode, as its title suggests fairly well, makes a statement about the legacy of our gun-centric culture.  As Kirk points out near the end, for mankind to have reached the stars, they needed to give up the uninhibited impulse to kill each other.  Quite in line with the Roddenberry image of a future in which Star Trek can happen!

A final note:  seeing this episode reminded me to watch a TV program I recently DVRed: Top 10 Shootouts from the Discovery Channel.  Sure enough, O.K. Corral made the list.  I really enjoyed how the two experts demonstrated how in many of the gunfights it was the particular choice of gun that made the ultimate difference in the outcome.  At O.K. Corral, it was Doc Holliday's short double-barrel shotgun at close range that sealed the victory for the lawmen.


Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Mar. 10, 286 days remaining


Is There in Truth No Beauty?   (A Medusan:  a chest of psychedelic lights.)
Spectre of the Gun  (The Earps were the bad guys.)

Day of the Dove  (Klingons are looking darker in this episode.)

Video Mission Update: 63 / 728 hours = 8.7%

Of Wings and Men

(March 9)

To celebrate a week of production software deployment requests, I decided to try out some man fare from Hudson Roast Beef and Wing.  Ordered three types of wings: Zesty Orange, Thai Sweet, and Hot Buffalo.  Very decent chicken; though the sauces didn't jump out at me.  The orange tasted sweet, but not enough like orange.  The Hot Buffalo was not as hot as I can tolerate, so next time I should certainly go with the Super Hot Buffalo!

One reviewer on the Yelp page for this restaurant talked about problems requesting apparently an order of mild buffalo wings with "no spice" and then being surprised that they apparently were not made to their definition of "no spice."  Let me explain something fundamental about Buffalo wings, my friends.  They are designed, by definition, to register somewhere well north of zero on the Scoville scale.  They are made with a sauce that comes from chili peppers.  The spiciness can range from mild, which should merely tickle the palate, all the way to atomic levels that some establishments will make you sign a waiver before you are served.  Check out this sauce heat scale!

If you are really looking for "no spice", choose one of the many other non-Buffalo sauces that Hudson Roast Beef and Wing offers.  Another bit of timely advice, you probably also want to stay away from the sauce called "Saigon Sizzle."

Wings are very high on the list of foods that I'll miss when the world is gone.  So, what's my personal favorite wing sauce?  In my vast lifetime wings experience, I'd have to go with sriracha, with some honey and lime.  Here's a great recipe.  Enjoy!



Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Mar. 9, 287 days remaining


And the Children Shall Lead  (Brats on the Enterprise.)

Video Mission Update: 60 / 728 hours = 8.2%

Solar Storm

(March 8)

When I learned of today's solar storm, I just knew what today's blog topic would have to be.  So I spent a few hours studying up on solar activity.  The Earth is always being pelted by particles from the Sun; the so-called "solar wind."  Our atmosphere is able to protect us from this normal activity, and even from the increase in radiation due to the occasional solar flare or coronal mass ejection.

So which outcome do you believe, the version shown in the film Knowing?  Or this public service announcement by NASA?

In my book, a massive solar storm bringing about EOTW cannot be excluded!  And in that case, sorry folks, your SPF 1,000,000 lotion will be ineffective.

Doomsday Bunkers

(March 7)

The Discovery Channel premiered Doomsday Bunkers today, sort of a companion show to Doomsday Preppers, which we visited earlier in the year.  Bunkers is pretty interesting stuff, because it features some engineering aspects, and if the first episode is any indicator, there will be lots of explosions, compressed air guns, robotic arms wielding guns, and generally good information on what to look for in your home away from home, so to speak.

I simply do not have the cash for a bunker.  Which means I'm pretty much doomed on doomsday.


(March 6)

Is this cheating?  But it's Oscar Mayer Turkey Bacon!  Come on!

Brazilian Pizza

(March 4)

When I first moved to Marlborough more than 10 years ago, I quickly noticed the choice of languages on ATMs and in supermarket checkout lines was English and Portuguese -- a large Brazilian community in the area.  But I never really took advantage of Brazilian eateries in town until last year, when we sampled a buffet called "Beef Grill", that unfortunately has since closed.  I found out from the owner that evening that the economic downturn had forced about 40% of the Brazilian community to go back home for work.

Fortunately, there are still a number of restaurants that serve Brazilian fare, and we'll just have to see how many of them I get to in 2012!  Today, I got to try Brazilian style pizza from Superior Pie on Main Street.  Their super-deluxe pizza includes ham, linguica, and other pork products, so I had to skip that one, but I went with a pie where ham was the only meat and replaced that with ground beef.  Other toppings:  sliced hard-boiled egg, green olive, artichoke, corn, oregano, and others.  A very different pizza experience for me -- and very tasty.  I enjoyed it with a side of yucca fries.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

(March 3)

It's probably sad to admit this, but from time to time I catch myself wishing for a sum of money to wipe the slate clean.  I sometimes purchase a Mega Millions or PowerBall lottery ticket, but truthfully, I'm not looking for that level of winnings.  Just one million dollars will cover things nicely :-)

And, as I watched my recording of Slumdog Millionaire this morning, it was very easy to root for the protagonist to make it all the way to the top.  That's a fantastic piece of cinema, by the way.  Final answer.

Your kind donation of:

• $8 -- allows me to continue my Star Trek marathon through Netflix for another month.
• $100 -- will earn you sponsorship of one blog entry.
• $1,000,000 -- will allow me to pay off all my worldly debts and quit my job to focus on this blog until EOTW.  Heaven knows this blog is in dire need of some focus  :-)

So, what are you waiting for?  Donate today via PayPal to tom.c.mckinney.business AT gmail.com!

Snow Day

(March 1)

This is how the winter will go on the books, with a storm in late October and the next big one in early March!  It was a welcome storm for Marcie; heavy enough to close school and sticky enough for snowballs.  All three of us got a little shovelling in, yup, Marcie included.  She was in a very helpful mood!

Aside from that fun, it was a work day, and I worked from home, helping a colleague to get his software ready for production deployment, as I had gone through myself the previous day.  I discovered an interesting rule about working from home on a snow day -- everyone else is too.  This had the neat effect of making the company VPN bandwidth very, very slow.  Copying files from my machine to the corporate network drive was a tedious chore that often ended in failure.  In the afternoon, I gave up and drove to the office just to copy a few files around inside the network.

To summarize, I developed my first law of corporate thermodynamics.  On snowy days,

Tcommute + Tcopy inside network < Tcopy over VPN

where T represents time.  Actual values for today, in minutes:  20 + 2 < 45.

Leap Day Release

(February 29)

While most of you were hopefully doing something unique and fulfilling on your gift day of the year, I was at work.  It was a special day of work, though, as I got the green light to do my first software production release since I joined this company.  Now, as software engineers will tell you, often we develop the software but do not deploy it -- that is to say we do not install it in the production environments.  In some cases though, we get to wear two hats and do the development AND the installation.  Today is one of those cases; it won't always work out this way.

It's a cool thing to be able to deploy your own software, but there was the inevitable surprise in the form of user access to the production servers.  I needed to rethink my production scripts on the fly -- later I'm going to have to redo the whole installation.  Oh well.

The analogy I came up with is that I've been training for the big race in a car with an automatic transmission, and when the big race day finally comes and I'm shown the race car, it turns out that I'd better figure out how to drive a manual pretty darn quick :-)

(March 5)

Following the initial release on Leap Day, I found myself involved in a flurry of weekend troubleshooting, although my role was pretty much "on demand deployer."  Not too exciting, but you gotta do what you gotta do!

Monday morning, the team held a well-earned celebration including this cake.  The company is called Konditor Meister, and if you poke around their web site, you will see some amazing stuff.  The cake was exceptional -- really.

Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By

(February 27)

I visited the FIOS store in Framingham to return my basement set top box.  One box will suffice; we don't use the second box enough to justify the $10/month rental fee.

(February 28)

I am finally giving the Fast Lane program a try.  I don't use toll roads that often, but the days of fishing for change are behind me.  Let's all give me a hearty welcome to the 21st century!  Seriously, though, it's great that the program extends south to Washington, D.C. and west to Chicago.  Planning to head to D.C. in April, as a matter of fact.

(March 2)

I finally got around to ordering TurboTax for the year, but I won't be doing my taxes until the end of March or so.  Much more interestingly, I also ordered Dragon Naturally Speaking.  The intent is to reduce some typing in these blog entries :-)


Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Feb. 27, 298 days remaining


FIOS bill reduced.

Monthly Expense Mission Update: $291 / $400 per month = 73%

Nostradamus

(February 26)

Any day that starts with banana-cinnamon pancakes and finishes with Woo Jung restaurant in Ayer is already a very good day to have in the books.

I had another task today, however, and that was to learn a bit about one of the most famous prognosticators in Western history: Michel de Nostradame.  So I watched a recorded episode of Mystery Files devoted to him and learned a few interesting tidbits.

• A significant number of entries in his famous tome, "The Prophecies," were copied from earlier works!  In our modern culture of academic integrity, surely there would have been repercussions on Nostradamus's credibility.
• The evidence shows that Nostradamus made some pretty basic charting errors in some of his prepared astrological horoscopes.  Planets placed in the wrong constellations, etc.  He received a certain amount of criticism from his professional contemporaries.
• Nostradamus predicted the world will end in 3797.  Wow, was he way off!

Teach me more about Nostradamus, the man, the legend, in the comments section!

Berries

(February 25)

I wistfully stared in the open refrigerator, but it was to no avail.  The berries were gone.

I usually rotate through a container of strawberries, blueberries, or my personal faves: red raspberries.  They mainly go with yogurt, and sometimes in other concoctions.  But today, I am out of luck...  no, wait, there's Ben and Jerry's Frozen Greek Yogurt, Raspberry with Chocolate Chunks in the freezer!  Tangy yogurt flavor, with a hint of raspberry, and large chocolate pieces.  It's pretty darn good.

On the subject of berries, I think I'll announce my first ever Tom's 2012 Bucket List Contest!

Tom's 2012 Bucket List Contest #1

Rules:  Submit your EOTW/PA-inspired short story.  The story must in some way incorporate berries into the plot.  An example synopsis might be:

With the end of Planet Earth impending, humans send a capsule containing various natural and artificial products into space.  The intelligent species of a distant Earth-like planet recovers the capsule much later, and inspecting the contents, they discover various seeds.  Unfortunately, one of the seed types proves to be highly invasive to their floral ecosystem, and while the small round blue fruits are pleasing to the visual organs, they are very toxic to the fauna.  The End.

Deadline:  December 1, 2012
Submit to:  tom.c.mckinney AT gmail.com
Prizes:  Cool Tom's 2012 Bucket List swag to the top 3 submissions, as judged by me!  :-)


Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Feb. 25, 300 days remaining


Spock's Brain  (Bones remote controls Spock's brainless body.)
The Enterprise Incident  (Scotty wishes that cloaking device used USB.)
The Paradise Syndrome  (Kirk finally gets married, but...)

Video Mission Update: 59 / 728 hours = 8.1%

Hot Lunch Date

(February 24)

Bet this title got your attention.  Maybe this will show up on search engines and increase readership from the 8 or so unique visitors that I know of.  I expect to double that number to 16 by EOTW.

Not so fast, my friends!  This is really just a post to let everyone know that we got a chance to try Stevie's Eatery in Marlborough.  They provide the hot lunches at Marcie's school and sent some promotions back home to the parents.  (Now, if Marcie had her way she'd eat Kraft Mac and Cheese for lunch every day, and she nearly gets her way.)  I definitely wanted to sample the place that provides school lunch, and I went with the mystery meat patty.  Just kidding, I went with the steak and cheese, which was very tasty.  Also, the chili tasted like chili, but it had an unusually uniform texture -- no lumpiness from beans or tomatoes or pieces of meat.  Mystery chili, perhaps.


Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Feb. 24, 301 days remaining


Canceled my iPhone 3GS plan now that I'm on a company phone!

Monthly Expense Mission Update: $281 / $400 per month = 70%

The Google House Rules

(February 23)

Sometimes over lunch when we're shooting the breeze, the topic of Google's domination comes up.  This is usually in the form of the "evil" corporation that owns all the data.  Then I put my phone down and quip, "what did I miss?  I was checking my Gmail."  Anyway, it really is very funny, since we work for the company that wants to own all of the hardware that stores all that data  :-)

I've sold my digital soul to Google several times over.  Gmail, Google Voice, this blog (Blogger), and as of tonight, I've entered all my contacts into Google Contacts to sync them with my new iPhone.  That's right, if you're reading this and you suspect that I have your number, your data is with Google now.  And that's just the way this planet works now, so get over it.  Ten more Googlicious months to go.

Drops from My 2012 Bucket: Feb. 23, 302 days remaining


By Any Other Name  (A spacecraftjacking by the Andromedans.  Ahhh... Kelinda.)
The Omega Glory  (The Red Menace, Prime Directive-style)
The Ultimate Computer  (Blacula vs. Kirk)
Bread and Circuses  (Gladiators)
Assignment: Earth  (Seven, Gary Seven.  This would have been a fun spinoff.)

Video Mission Update: 56 / 728 hours = 7.7%