Geek Recipe #1 - Holiday Leftover Sandwich

In a new series here on Fever Head, I'm posting one of my favorite recipes...Holiday Leftover Sandwich. It may seem weird...but go with me on this. Trust me, you will NOT be disappointed.

You need the following holiday leftovers and additional ingredients:

• Turkey
• Dressing (Or Stuffing)
• Mashed Potatoes
• Cranberry Gelatin/Salad (OPTIONAL)
• Bread (Potato Bread is very nice)
• Mayonnaise
• Salt/Pepper

Start with two slices of bread. Put a little mayonnaise on both slices. Then add a little salt and pepper to taste. You may use the ingredients either warm or cold...it works well either way. Place sandwich-sized equal amounts of the turkey, dressing, and potatoes on the bread. If you are sick and like cranberry, add a little bit to the top. Finish the sandwich with the other slice of bread, and press it all down a little to mix it together a little. Cut in half if you prefer, serve with a tall glass of milk, or maybe a good white wine leftover from dinner.

Turkey Day Goodness

This year's Turkey Day holiday was good fun. It was relaxing to have some time off, and the time out of town was enjoyable.

We went to see the new Harry Potter movie. Excellent. The acting from the kids is getting better. The acting from the adults is magnificent. I still don't love the new Dumbledore...I preferred Richard Harris. But overall the movie was excellent. David Tennant was exceptional in the film. He's a great actor, and given he's the new Doctor Who, I'm very happy about the future of the new Who series.

Another good Turkey Day.

Randomness Before The Holidays

Work has been going well, and now that I'm finally on vacation for the Turkey Day holiday, I can spend enough time to post to the blog. I turned 32 on Monday. Another year in orbit...whoop dee doo. Nothing special happened...as usual, Smacky had a concert on my birthday...so I spent most of this one at work or alone at home. Oh well, they can't all be exciting. Heh.

On the Geek front, I cannot say enough good things about the company VMWare. Not only do their products kick some serious ass, two new reasons to love them have surfaced. One, they have created the VMWare Technology Network...where professionals such as myself can spend a few hundred dollars a year and get rights to run nearly all of their products in a development/testing scenario. Excellent! It will rapidly increase my knowledge of their products, and if a lot of professionals take advantage, it could lead to massive uptake of the products in corporate infrastructures. It could be a sea-change in how computing is done at the lowest level. Massively cool. And two, they have released VMWare Player, which essentially is a VMWare runtime environment for a pre-created virtual machine. And did I mention it is FREE?! YES! Now I can carry around a VM on a flash drive and have my private environment up and running on any random PC in no time!

On the food front, at the behest of certain Lazy McWhinertons, I'll be putting up a page on the website for all future 3RD parties. This page will show the date of the next upcoming 3RD, as well as the theme and/or menu. It will be up by the time December rolls around. This way, those unable to calculate the date of the third thursday can simply load the webpage. The onus to RSVP will still be on the attendees. I can't do everything...geez.

Three new wines are about the go up on IVV, and I think it will be a first since the description for one of them requires "band-aid" to describe its flavor.

That's all for now...time to relax for the holidays, eat turkey, and enjoy the time off work. Hooray! Happy Turkey Day to all my friends and family!

Another Fine Evening Of Properly Wasted Time

This month's Third Thursday Dinner (from here on out called "3RD") was a success (despite a slight fiasco in timing with the damn turkey). Yet again, my mad turkey-cooking 5k1llz were frustrated by a non-popping pop-out thermometer and inconsistent temperature readings in the meat. In the end, however, the turkey was delightfully juicy and tasty, and no one has been sick as yet...

This 3RD was a Turkey Day celebration, with a 21 pound bird, a tray of dressing (no stuffing, thank you very much...stuffing only in the DFA/Smacky household), fresh green beans sauteed with butter and almonds, and fresh rolls. Oh and for dessert: a pumpkin pie, with fresh-whipped whipped-cream. All of it made from scratch, except the turkey and the pie which we bought. I changed up the recipe a little from the last time we made a holiday dinner, and was pleasantly surprised. Less rosemary this year, in its place some celery seeds...both of them ground really fine with a mortar and pestle. Then a pinch of paprika and cayenne brought out excellent flavor in both the turkey as well as the dressing. The dressing had four breads this year: pumpernickel, rye, potato, and whole wheat. YUM!

Horrory brought a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau, Nemo brought a bottle of strong Italian table wine. We provided a merlot and a couple chards. We polished off a fair amount of wine, evidenced in part by the gaggle of three giggling women sitting at the dining room table, cackling almost to the point of peeing themselves, while wearing their dinner napkins around their face, calling themselves "The Turkey Bandits." No, I'm not making this up. Yes, you read that right. "The Turkey Bandits." That shit stopped quick when I said something about veiled women needing to defer to men's needs and putting out on demand...that made the Turkey Bandits unmask pretty darn quick. Heh.

Nico brought a couple bottles of mead, meant for dessert, but it was so late by the time we were ready for dessert, people had to start sobering up. So we saved the mead for December's 3RD.

All in all, an excellent evening, despite a few problems. Food, drink, friends...that's what life's all about. Or, "DRINK! GIRLS! FECK!" as Father Jack would say.

Busy And Not Online

Lately, I've barely had time to check email and maybe hit a website or two. Work and life have been busy, but at least they haven't been dull.

Last weekend we went north to East Lansing, Michigan to visit my sister and celebrate her twenty-first birthday. The drive up was nice, low-key, and enjoyable...greatly helped by some audio-plays of Jeeves & Wooster. We arrived, got the hotel sorted, and took a nap. Later we met up with my sister and brother, went to dinner, and then proceeded to try to find a decent bar or nightclub in East Lansing. No go. The closest we got was a brew-pub/restaurant. It was reasonably tolerable, but the company of my siblings and a couple of my sister's friends made the night a fun time.

Saturday we all had lunch with my dad, step-mother, and youngest sister, who travelled up from Detroit to visit. It was pleasant, despite my having bad restaurant karma that day. Another nap in the afternoon, and we were ready for another night on the town. This time, I convinced the gaggle of us to go to Lansing's gay bar (or at least their most readily known gay bar)...apparently it was a happening place.

Turns out we were right. The Spiral is THE nightclub in Lansing, from what we could tell. All chrome and velvet...very New York...filled with lots of nice people...and a great dance floor. It was a great club. The music was good, solid House. The drinks were well-poured, strong, sizable, and affordable. Excellent.

We got home late Sunday, in time to have a bite, watch Rome, and then collapse. A tiring weekend, but it was wonderful to spend time with my siblings outside of the context of our parents...something I've not had a chance to do over the years since they moved out of Louisville. Hopefully we'll do this sort of road trip more often...I'd like to be a better brother to my sister...

Work has been interesting. I finalized the new cluster configurations enough to make them stable...I hope. It seems to have held up so far, but it hasn't had much time to prove itself yet. Now I'm moving on to SAN upgrades, expansions, and older-SAN decommissioning. We have two older SANs that need retiring, and a way to get that storage hosted on our current enterprise SAN. While keeping in mind upcoming expansions in the SAN and how we might structure things to make best use of resources while still providing storage to those systems in need. Great stuff. I'm enjoying it immensely.

If that weren't enough, tomorrow (almost tonight at this point) is this month's third-thursday. We're having a big turkey-day-dinner-a-week-before-Turkey-Day evening, with a huge turkey, my family recipe dressing (no nasty stuffing thank you), and some sauteed green beans. I hope we have more than a handful of people...there will be a lot of food. If not, I always have loved left-over turkey sandwiches. I'm sure it will be great fun, and I think tomorrow we'll break open our friend Dan's homemade wine and serve it with the eight-year-aged cheddar.

Also, I found a neat sci-fi show that doesn't seem to suck. It's called Charlie Jade and it is a joint South African and Canadian television series. Decent acting. "Realistic" characters. Good story development. Enough sci to make it sci-fi, but not so much to make it unbearable. It is so NOT American television in its pacing and style...and feels more like a very long movie being shown as a mini-series. I've only seen a little bit of it, but I highly recommend you look for it...I don't know what its availability is...but keep an eye out for it. If I ever find out where it is available, I'll post it here.

New Kilts Are Fun

I finally received my new kilt (ground shipping sucks...ugh). It's great...lightweight and comfy, yet still tailored enough to have that great Utilikilt pleated look.

I love it. I'll have to get one or two more of these sport-weight kilts. After that, maybe another Mocker.

I wish kilts weren't so costly...

Web Of The Day #18

House Says "No" To Corporate Eminent Domain
I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this. Shocked, stunned, and flabbergasted. All I can say is that it likely won't make it past the Senate and signature into law without being gutted by amendments. I have little faith in this coming to pass. It would be nice, but I do wonder what about this bill I'm missing if the Bush administration is backing it (remember, children, skepticism can be healthy).

Biggest Star Trek Nerd-Out...EVER!
Oh wow. I mean. Wow. My nerd-nipples could cut glass right now... Me want.

480-lb Woman Dies On Couch
This is just sad, disturbing, and horrific. Flesh fused with furniture?! Ugh.

German Company Bans Whining, Requires Happiness
Anyone remember the "Happiness Patrol" storyline of Doctor Who? Fuck you, Nutzwerk!

Sick = Suck = Wine Nerds

So I've been a bit under the weather for over a week now. But it finally seems to have died down. Yesterday I felt much better, and had a really pleasant day doing very little. We did watch Sideways yesterday, while enjoying a good Port Salut cheese, fresh pistachios, and an exceptional gewurtztraminer (a 1999 Trimbach, from Alsace). The Trimbach was everything I had hoped it would be: light, not too dry, not too sweet...perfect.

Sideways wasn't bad. The uber-oenophile aspect of it was a bit tiresome. I felt like I was listening to my wife's west-coast friends. They're nice people, but they have bought into the wine-country myth wholesale, to the point they were (in my opinion) offended when I told someone at our table "...it's not the vintner or the year, it's not about rules, it's about whether you enjoy the flavor of the wine." Maybe they drink far more wine than I do, but when I open a bottle I care about two things: do I like the taste, and is there enough to share with friends.

That is not to say I know everything about wine, or that there are not subtleties in such a complex product. But ultimately, it is made to be drunk, and be enjoyable in the process. All other considerations are secondary. Drink chards with steak. Drink reds with chicken. Enjoy that $8 a bottle wine if it tastes good to you. If you have the desire and the palate, sure, become an oenophile. Just remember that the deeper you go into it, the less different you are from any other -phile out there, from computer-geeks, to Trek-heads, to Dead/Phish-heads, to Who-fans, et cetera. You're just nerding-out on something different, you big nerd you.

Happy Early Birthday To Me

Today I ordered my birthday gift. Granted, it's about three weeks early, but hey, sometimes you just have to treat yourself.

It's a new Utilikilt. This model is called "The Spartan" and is basically a sports-wear version of a UK. It looks like most athletic shorts/shirts...that shiny (nylon?) fabric. It is tailored in typical UK style with a boxing-shorts-style elastic waistband. Finally a truly casual kilt that I can throw on to lounge around, do yard work in, or run to the store!

What's more interesting is that it is a one-of-a-few model from a lot that were done to try different fabrics and colors. So not only is the fabric from a limited trial run, the color is not one they'll be carrying. So I basically have a collector's kilt! Cool!

My love for UK as a company is growing. They have a great product, at an affordable (as long as you save for it) price, and they seem to be good corporate citizens. Rawk.