Easily Distracted

Eager to use some new kitchenware I bought over the weekend (a post in itself, perhaps), I made dinner last night. Along with the salmon, I stir-fried veggies & rice and attempted a simple white sauce using a white wine reduction. All things considered, it went pretty well. The biggest problem was that the salmon was too dry by the time we ate: I shouldn’t have fully cooked it, because it became a bit overcooked while staying “warm” in the oven waiting for me to finish the rest. I used a single sauté pan because I wanted the flavours of everything in the reduction/sauce – so I should have planned better. I also think I used a bit too much oil. I had never tried making a white sauce or a reduction before, but they turned out quite decent. The red onions used as garnish on top of the salmon were also sautéed in a little white wine, making them sweet. The sauce ended up compensating for the dry salmon. I had a decent lunch today. And it was pretty low carb, too!

I like my new pots. And knives. Cooking’s fun.

We have a potluck lunch in the office, tomorrow, so I did something I never do: bake. I know, I know. Anyway, I decided on these things called Tuna Teasers – I remember enjoying when my mom had made them. Then I looked at the recipe. My god, was it simple! And quick! It’s from a recipe book called Fast and Fantastic, so I guess it holds true, in this case. Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

• 1 c flour (I used whole wheat flour)
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp onion salt (I substituted with onion flakes)
• 1/2 tsp curry powder
• dash of cayenne pepper
• 1/4 c butter
• 1/2 c milk
• 1 can flaked tuna fish, drained
• 1 c shredded cheddar cheese
• 1 tbsp finely minced green pepper (I substituted with green onion)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 450F (230C). Combine first 5 ingredients. Cut in butter until mixture resembles fine crumbs. Add milk and stir until blended. Add last 3 ingredients. Mix well. Drop by tablespoonfuls onto lightly greased baking sheet. Bake for 10-15 minutes or until golden brown.

Makes 36 small puffs. About 15 medium sized.

My laptop has had its fair share of problems, mostly because it’s aging; I bought it nearly 6 years ago!! I’m actually impressed it’s aged so well! A few days ago, the display started to flicker with increasing frequency and become distorted shortly after turning it on. Here’s a video showing the problem: (Warning: contains a little bad language – woops…)

(Link to video here if embedded object doesn’t show up.)

Last night, I took it apart and tried wiggling every LCD-related wire I could find, hoping to affect the display’s output and conclude it was a fixable loose connection.

Nope. Fine. Who needs a screen anyway?

I now have a very compact desktop – it even includes wireless, keyboard, mouse and speakers! It just needs a monitor. I haven’t decided whether I will make it a pseudo media PC to stream things from my desktop to the TV (a little work), or just to have it replace the family computer (almost no work!). The family usually gets my computer hand-me-downs.

Anyway, looks like I’ll need a new laptop sometime soon. I vowed to go smaller with my next laptop, but I’m not sure if a netbook would suffice. Of course, I would like it to run Linux (Ubuntu?), have long battery life, reasonable storage, support WPA2, have a built-in 1.3MP camera, and all that good stuff. Bluetooth would be nice, too. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

I biked to the pool today. Swung by the barber, but he was just closing so I carried on my merry way. I remember hearing a popping sound at some point, but disregarded it. Spent a nice, long time at the pool relaxing. I didn’t really want to bike home because I was tired, but I eventually left.

I unlock my bike, get my bag on, and routinely check my tires. Front? Good. Back? ….what’s this? Uh oh. I didn’t expect a completely flat tire. It was dark out, but I rotated the tire and found a thin metal rod lodged into it. Aah… At least they weren’t slashed.

I set off on foot… walking it would take me over an hour to get back home. After 30 minutes or so, as I was walking my bike on the sidewalk, a bus pulled up and dropped off a passenger right in front of me. This surprised me because I had looked a schedule on one of the bus stops earlier, and I wasn’t expecting any buses (plus, I had my headphones on and didn’t hear it). And… there was a bike rack on it! I skipped over to the bus driver, explained my situation (I had no bus fare), and he told me to get in. Sweet!! The bus driver was super nice, which really helped my night from being bad. Hey Mr Bus driver, you stopped to pick me up.

Thank you, kind Bus man.

Life

This year has been pretty big. Naturally following up with lots of events from last year, these are some quick memories. My nephew, Rayden, was born on Feb 12th, six weeks early! This caused the father (my brother) to be indisposed for my dad’s (2nd) marriage on Feb 14th. I got bumped up to best man (but didn’t have to do much) and had a rather empty hotel room to myself in Vegas. I attended the Open Web Vancouver conference. I went to Whistler mountain for the first time in years and plan on going again soon. I went on a fantastic road trip down the west coast of the United States, something I will never forget. I slacked off most of the summer but managed to do quite a bit of rollerblading and outdoor activity hanging out with Kurt (visiting from Brazil). My brother, now a father, married the mother of his child on August 3rd. I was best man at this wedding, as well – with more responsibilities, but they were well received and totally worth it. Our beloved cat, Sky, met an early and terribly unfortunate end. We had our first encounter with bed bugs who are now the sworn enemy of our household. Vancouver, a city that sometimes doesn’t get snow all year, had its whitest Christmas ever with 60cm (2 ft) of snow! Perhaps we should have seen snow in April as a sign….?

That reminds me: Happy Holidays for 2008! Guess I was a little late on that… Here are some pictures of our insane weather in Vancouver.

Geekery

With my free time, I think I was able to really exercise my geekiness in 2008. I released a couple updates to the Rhythmbox Jump-to-Playing plugin, which led me to submit my first patch to an upstream project! Said patch was accepted and will be in the next version of Rhythmbox! Yay. It was just for some XML UI description, but it feels nice to have helped improve (even a tiny bit) a project that will be installed on thousands of computers in the next cycle. I also released a usable proof-of-concept GNOME Panel File List Applet which has stayed on my panel and I find quite useful. And I’ve done a couple little scripts and how-to’s that fall under the “nerd” category quite nicely. Oh yeah, and significant website updates. Next website todo item is to customize the attachment page for my theme, I think…. Also, I joined Twitter. And Identi.ca. And LinkedIn….

Art

Not many artsy things done this year. But with the significant improvements of tablet handling in Linux, I did some random doodles and a birthday card. I may not do it very often, but I still enjoy drawing, thank goodness.

Blog Stats for 2008

My Blog is by no means high traffic, but stats are fun! (These stats were obtained using the wordpress.com Stats plugin, and exclude the Feed stats, because I use Feedburner for that… although, I’m thinking I should revert that, now that I mostly use wordpress.com Stats.)

Top 3 Referrers:

1. http://live.gnome.org/RhythmboxPlugins/ThirdParty (402)
2. live.gnome.org/Boston2008/GUIHackfest (209)
3. siuyee.com (126)

Top 3 Posts and Pages:

1. Pidgin 2.1 UI Ideas (1,053)
2. 2D Game Art and the Virtual Console (580)
3. Rhythmbox Plugin: Jump to Playing 0.2 (455)

Top 3 Search Engine Terms:

1. rhythmbox (327)
2. bug (174)
3. pidgin (165)

Top 3 Clicks:

1. Pidgin UI screenshot attached to a bug (57)
2. Pidgin UI mockup (50) by Hylke Bons
3. SF2 HD Ken (42)

The fourth was launchpad.net/desktopdrawers with 38 clicks, so it’s kinda cool I helped advertise a small project a little. (A project I’ve submitted patches to, no less. )

Thanks

Thank you, everyone, for a wonderful 2008. It’s been interesting, and despite a failing economy, I’m looking positively toward 2009.

Happy New Year! (あけましておめでとうございます！)

It was a nice fall day a couple days ago. I really enjoyed this sight, in my backyard. Quite overcast and dull, the last couple of days, though.

Games

I updated my About page with my Tetris Party friend code. (Add me!!) It’s pretty fun, but I say that as someone who has never owned a Tetris game before, so I’m not a Tetris vet… (unlike Shirley and Alex, who think the DS game is far superior, apparently). My only real complaint with the game so far is the music – they could have done AWESOME things with it. I want a hoppin 8bit remix of these classic tunes… the included midi, even the classic stuff, is pretty dry and slow. Need something with a faster pace. The computer moves at seemingly impossible speeds at levels above 12, but I suspect that some people out there can play like that, as well. Scary. (Especially the top ranked in the Americas, Java AI … hmmm…) Anyway, I can’t beat level 13 yet. And I think I still like Dr Mario for VS more… so fun. … but Tetris Party offers tonnes of modes, including 4-player vs! That’s pretty cool. Maybe I’ll become a Tetris snob, yet.

While on the topic of Wii(Ware), I also got World of Goo. It’s a really great physics based puzzle title. I really love the dark and comical graphic design (reminds me of Tim Burton’s stuff). The music in Goo is epic, as well. I can’t believe everything was made by two guys (+1 for Wii optimizations); two guys in debt! They’re my heroes. Seriously. Both Tetris Party and World of Goo are the most expensive games on WiiWare ($12 US, $15 US, respectively), but I haven’t been disappointed. And with Goo especially, I don’t have any problem supporting the little guys making great stuff. That’s where I’d like to be.

WordPress

I updated my wp-upgrade script to display a big warning to deactivate all your plugins before continuing (wouldn’t want to damage your database!). Then I used it to update to WordPress 2.6.3. I think that makes me largely up-to-date.