Happy Thursday! Did you know that having a week off of school can be quite tiring?
Monday through yesterday we went camping; me, Carolyn, and Carolyn's childhood neighbors Christina and Ashley. We had a tent and cots and cooked over an open fire and spent the mornings among deer and a herd of turkeys. It was freezing. We wandered up and down a stony creekbed and through poison oak-studded woods and along dry yellow fields. It was a pretty good time.
Yesterday we cooked breakfast on the firepit, drove home, and about an hour later me and my family headed into LA. At 8 we saw the Book of Mormon, which was pretty cute. My favorite was Spooky Mormon Hell Dream. A pretty weird day, yesterday.
Today I slept in and watched some Downton Abbey with Beth and then played some Borderlands 2 with Carolyn and Steven.
I'm so sleepy I think it's tea time.
-Steph
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Thursday, October 18, 2012
до свидания собачка
Happy Thursday! What a hot week we had again! I feel like I'd be okay with the seasons shifting so that falltime was really summer weather, as long as I could count on a full non-stop season of it. A few weeks here and there throughout the year just isn't in the spirit of things.
What IS in the spirit is all these squashes I have downstairs. Basically I've been telling myself I'm cooking with "pumpkin" but I haven't even cut open an actual pumpkin yet. Let me tell you about the line up.
The kabocha had quite a yield. Diced in curry last week; steamed the other half. The puree made an appetizer-sized soup (1 can coconut milk, two cloves garlic pureed, half inch ginger pureed, salt, pepper, curry powder, pinch of cinnamon, dab of mango chutney), a batch of ice cream, and the cup or so leftover went into another curry base this week.
Buttercup squash: Half, diced, in the new curry (1 leek, quartered and diced; 1 carrot, diced; garlic and ginger as above; salt and pepper; curry powder by the spoonful; the kabocha puree; cashew bits; 1 can coconut milk; splash of vegetable stock; fresh cilantro). Has a nice, yam-potato quality. The other half, steamed and mashed, went into a gingersnap recipe. Can't tell squash is in your cookies, but they do have a nice fluffy cake-like consistency.
My mom came and visited me at school today and we went over and got another arm load of squashes. Here's the haul:
Acorn squash: Bought one with the buttercup but don't know what to do with it. Got another one today and my mom baked it, right? I came home and tried a fork of it, but it's one of those... wormy? fibrous? mealy? types and it's not my fave. The other two were both quite firm and solid, like butternut squash. This one reminds me of how carving pumpkins look like inside. Seems like I'd rather smash it and hide it in a dish than let it be the centerpiece.
Red kuri: I don't know anything about it other than it sounds like "curry" and that's okay in my book. It looks like a big redorange Christmas ornament. I think the guy said it's really hollow inside and the meat's all around the edge. But it sounds like another solid type and I'm looking forward to getting it open.
Orange-striped cushaw squash: This one is my favorite just for looks. I forgot its name and looked it up just now and it looks like a winner. Good for pies.
Carnival squash: ??? It's so cute! It's that size and look where it might not be an edible one, but the guy said they were good. I don't know! We'll find out.
We got another buttercup and a decorative yellow thing. And of course there's the pie pumpkin I bought the first time around. Geez what am I going to do with them all!
Oh, hahah well, I'm glad you asked. I have a pumpkin to-do list up on the fridge.
I'm sure I had other things to talk about than harvest vegetables... probably.
-Steph
What IS in the spirit is all these squashes I have downstairs. Basically I've been telling myself I'm cooking with "pumpkin" but I haven't even cut open an actual pumpkin yet. Let me tell you about the line up.
The kabocha had quite a yield. Diced in curry last week; steamed the other half. The puree made an appetizer-sized soup (1 can coconut milk, two cloves garlic pureed, half inch ginger pureed, salt, pepper, curry powder, pinch of cinnamon, dab of mango chutney), a batch of ice cream, and the cup or so leftover went into another curry base this week.
Buttercup squash: Half, diced, in the new curry (1 leek, quartered and diced; 1 carrot, diced; garlic and ginger as above; salt and pepper; curry powder by the spoonful; the kabocha puree; cashew bits; 1 can coconut milk; splash of vegetable stock; fresh cilantro). Has a nice, yam-potato quality. The other half, steamed and mashed, went into a gingersnap recipe. Can't tell squash is in your cookies, but they do have a nice fluffy cake-like consistency.
My mom came and visited me at school today and we went over and got another arm load of squashes. Here's the haul:
Acorn squash: Bought one with the buttercup but don't know what to do with it. Got another one today and my mom baked it, right? I came home and tried a fork of it, but it's one of those... wormy? fibrous? mealy? types and it's not my fave. The other two were both quite firm and solid, like butternut squash. This one reminds me of how carving pumpkins look like inside. Seems like I'd rather smash it and hide it in a dish than let it be the centerpiece.
Red kuri: I don't know anything about it other than it sounds like "curry" and that's okay in my book. It looks like a big redorange Christmas ornament. I think the guy said it's really hollow inside and the meat's all around the edge. But it sounds like another solid type and I'm looking forward to getting it open.
Orange-striped cushaw squash: This one is my favorite just for looks. I forgot its name and looked it up just now and it looks like a winner. Good for pies.
Carnival squash: ??? It's so cute! It's that size and look where it might not be an edible one, but the guy said they were good. I don't know! We'll find out.
We got another buttercup and a decorative yellow thing. And of course there's the pie pumpkin I bought the first time around. Geez what am I going to do with them all!
Oh, hahah well, I'm glad you asked. I have a pumpkin to-do list up on the fridge.
- Ice cream
- Pumpkin soup
- Pumpkin roll cake
- Pumpkin cinnamon roll
- Chocolate-pumpkin cake
- pie
I'm sure I had other things to talk about than harvest vegetables... probably.
-Steph
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Field Trips
Happy Thursday! This week we were promised rain, but it only sprinkled the tiniest bit yesterday in the cemetery. My Bing weather app on my Windows 8 computer also promises weather in the 80s next week, so I just don't know what to believe anymore.
Have I told you that my school has a field on one side, a freeway on another, and a cemetery on the other? True story. It was fieldtrip week.
Tuesday me and Beth walked over to the pumpkin patch. From the freeway, you can see where the pumpkins grew, and a lot are still sitting out in the green waiting for you to come and get them. But a block or so back, is the dirt lot with allll the pumpkins and squashes and gourds. And goats. We were walking up the dirt hill lined with carving pumpkins, and all you could see was pumpkins and pumpkins and sky. We bought a pie pumpkin and a kabocha, a Japanese squash. Kabocha got skinned and curried with an apple and mango chutney. What a sweet curry! Pie pumpkin is going to getwhat pie pumpkin deserves steamed and will probably be some sort of pie or cake or cookie or ice cream.
Don't you love fall?
Other field trip was not quite so literally a field trip. I'd never actually been in that cemetery before, so we just walked right over. There was a whole corner of Japanese family plots. We found three Masons. The oldest grave we saw was from like 1886 or something. We saw two other people strolling around wearing the same lanyards as from my school. It was quite exciting.
Other than that this week has mostly been Borderlands and Active Directory. In one, I high-fived a robot. It wasn't Active Directory.
We also saw Looper yesterday, which I was ambivalent about because A) Joseph Gordon-Levitt was playing a time-traveling assassin and B) movies with that sort of premise are usually Jumper or Push. (What I mean here is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, time traveling, and assassins are all 100 points apiece. Jumper and Push are both -200 points.) Like Jumper, and less-so Push, I wanted to be able to want to see it and be reasonably sure that I wouldn't regret the decision. Having learned, however, from Jumper and Push that this is most of the time an unreasonable expectation. Dem movies be bad.
Looper wasn't bad at all. I have to say that the sum was greater than the parts; there were some frayed ends in the storytelling, but the through line was quite secure. My favorite part of the whole thing was the first 20 seconds after the credits started, where I just went, "ah." I got it. Not the time traveling mess or whatever, just the heart of the story. The Why. Noir, baby. Sometimes you can find it in a sci-fi western.
I guess you don't know it, but I've always wanted to write a space western noir. I don't know how. Really, I'm content with Cowboy Bebop and Firefly (which we've started up again btw). Space + western + noir, I don't know why, but that is my favorite thing.
-Steph
Have I told you that my school has a field on one side, a freeway on another, and a cemetery on the other? True story. It was fieldtrip week.
Tuesday me and Beth walked over to the pumpkin patch. From the freeway, you can see where the pumpkins grew, and a lot are still sitting out in the green waiting for you to come and get them. But a block or so back, is the dirt lot with allll the pumpkins and squashes and gourds. And goats. We were walking up the dirt hill lined with carving pumpkins, and all you could see was pumpkins and pumpkins and sky. We bought a pie pumpkin and a kabocha, a Japanese squash. Kabocha got skinned and curried with an apple and mango chutney. What a sweet curry! Pie pumpkin is going to get
Don't you love fall?
Other field trip was not quite so literally a field trip. I'd never actually been in that cemetery before, so we just walked right over. There was a whole corner of Japanese family plots. We found three Masons. The oldest grave we saw was from like 1886 or something. We saw two other people strolling around wearing the same lanyards as from my school. It was quite exciting.
Other than that this week has mostly been Borderlands and Active Directory. In one, I high-fived a robot. It wasn't Active Directory.
We also saw Looper yesterday, which I was ambivalent about because A) Joseph Gordon-Levitt was playing a time-traveling assassin and B) movies with that sort of premise are usually Jumper or Push. (What I mean here is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, time traveling, and assassins are all 100 points apiece. Jumper and Push are both -200 points.) Like Jumper, and less-so Push, I wanted to be able to want to see it and be reasonably sure that I wouldn't regret the decision. Having learned, however, from Jumper and Push that this is most of the time an unreasonable expectation. Dem movies be bad.
Looper wasn't bad at all. I have to say that the sum was greater than the parts; there were some frayed ends in the storytelling, but the through line was quite secure. My favorite part of the whole thing was the first 20 seconds after the credits started, where I just went, "ah." I got it. Not the time traveling mess or whatever, just the heart of the story. The Why. Noir, baby. Sometimes you can find it in a sci-fi western.
I guess you don't know it, but I've always wanted to write a space western noir. I don't know how. Really, I'm content with Cowboy Bebop and Firefly (which we've started up again btw). Space + western + noir, I don't know why, but that is my favorite thing.
-Steph
Thursday, October 04, 2012
Troubleshooting
Happy Thursday! My education in computer repair has devolved into my unorganized mucking about in Windows 8 trying to accomplish who knows what, breaking it, fixing it somehow, breaking something else in the process, going on walks, reading about the Windows 8 tablet Surface, trying to remember how to use Server 2008, and writing a board game.
The newer Microsoft server OSs come with a virtualization program called Hyper-V. This is where you run Hyper-V, create a virtual machine (compared to a physical machine), install an OS on it, and that's about it. Among its many uses, a lot of people right now are running virtual Windows 8 preview versions to get a hang of the OS without having to dedicate any hardware to it. WHAT I DID WAS INSTALL WINDOWS 8 ON TWO COMPUTERS AND RUN HYPER-V ON ONE AND LOAD SERVER 2008 ON THE VIRTUAL MACHINE AND THEN JOIN THE PHYSICAL COMPUTERS TO THE DOMAIN.
Most of the problems I've run into while doing this have to do with my shady network. Most of the time it shows up as "unidentified network" and doesn't allow me to change its name or location even though there's no reason why it shouldn't. On top of that, when the non-Hyper-V machine has the wireless adapter in, it can't be bothered to network correctly. So I finally got everything to work just fine by loading the domain controller before turning that one on, and keeping the wireless NIC out. Then the network showed up as its proper self, Ivyfriends.local.
(The computers are called Ivywood and Ivybridge, the VM is called IvyVM, the virtual server is called Ivyserver, and the domain is Ivyfriends.local.)
BUT as far as I can tell, if Ivywood sees itself as a part of Ivyfriends.local, NONE OF THE APPS WORK. Haha, as bugs go, this is pretty hardcore. I fixed it by dismantling the VM, power cycling both machines, letting it connect to the wireless, and when the LAN connection was back to "unidentified network," the apps worked again.
I also spent the morning creating domain accounts and trying to see if I could set them up as roaming and copy the Windows 8 style account to other accounts. Turns out if you set up your default account on the server, that desktop configuration will be able to be copied to other roaming accounts when you sign into them from the other computer. But anything you do in the Windows 8 Start screen isn't going to translate into the roaming profile.
So that was my day.
Also in Borderlands we punched dirt and blew up creepers in a mine.
-Steph
The newer Microsoft server OSs come with a virtualization program called Hyper-V. This is where you run Hyper-V, create a virtual machine (compared to a physical machine), install an OS on it, and that's about it. Among its many uses, a lot of people right now are running virtual Windows 8 preview versions to get a hang of the OS without having to dedicate any hardware to it. WHAT I DID WAS INSTALL WINDOWS 8 ON TWO COMPUTERS AND RUN HYPER-V ON ONE AND LOAD SERVER 2008 ON THE VIRTUAL MACHINE AND THEN JOIN THE PHYSICAL COMPUTERS TO THE DOMAIN.
Most of the problems I've run into while doing this have to do with my shady network. Most of the time it shows up as "unidentified network" and doesn't allow me to change its name or location even though there's no reason why it shouldn't. On top of that, when the non-Hyper-V machine has the wireless adapter in, it can't be bothered to network correctly. So I finally got everything to work just fine by loading the domain controller before turning that one on, and keeping the wireless NIC out. Then the network showed up as its proper self, Ivyfriends.local.
(The computers are called Ivywood and Ivybridge, the VM is called IvyVM, the virtual server is called Ivyserver, and the domain is Ivyfriends.local.)
BUT as far as I can tell, if Ivywood sees itself as a part of Ivyfriends.local, NONE OF THE APPS WORK. Haha, as bugs go, this is pretty hardcore. I fixed it by dismantling the VM, power cycling both machines, letting it connect to the wireless, and when the LAN connection was back to "unidentified network," the apps worked again.
I also spent the morning creating domain accounts and trying to see if I could set them up as roaming and copy the Windows 8 style account to other accounts. Turns out if you set up your default account on the server, that desktop configuration will be able to be copied to other roaming accounts when you sign into them from the other computer. But anything you do in the Windows 8 Start screen isn't going to translate into the roaming profile.
So that was my day.
Also in Borderlands we punched dirt and blew up creepers in a mine.
-Steph
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