Oh, we have at my house and it was completely my fault.

I was making marinara sauce in bulk for a specific recipe that we make often. At the last minute I decided to press the garlic, but not reduce the amount and the results were not pleasing. It was way too much and none of us are vampires.

How you prep garlic depends on what you are doing with it, or what the recipe calls for.

What it comes down to, the more garlic flavor you want out of a clove, then the more you need to damage the garlic’s cellular walls.

So this means if you want some garlic flavor, then a rough chop would be fine. If you want a good amount of flavor, then mincing is necessary. If you want a metric f#$k ton of garlic flavor then you run it through a press.

Why wouldn’t you just use fewer garlic cloves and just use the press all the time? There are many reasons, but mainly because a pressed clove may be too over powering for the recipe. Also, if you are doing a slow cook, then larger pieces of garlic will enfuse the recipe better over the longer cook time than pressed garlic.

I hope the above makes sense. On the surface it appears that it’s just better to press garlic cloves and just adjust the amount you put in the recipe. However, there are real differences to the final product based upon how the garlic is prepped and added to the recipe.

I completely disagree that it’s not an issue.

That reactor is an OLD Babcock and Wilcox design that is at least two generations behind. The money and resources going into that pile of junk would be better spent on a new plant. Yes I’m well aware of the issues surrounding building new nuclear plants in the U.S. That’s a different conversation and not one I will enter into here. Sure in the short term, maybe even in the mid-term restarting that plant looks good on paper. However, that is still a reactor design that is over 60 years old and physically it is 50 years old. Not to mention the design has several documented short comings that require monitoring and processes that a new generation reactor would not need. Sure they’re not RBMK level of issues, but that reactor really should stay decommissioned.

It does not matter how many nuclear, solar, or wind plants that are built. The fact of the matter is that all of these resources, not just money, is being put into a technology, AI, that is of limited use at best at the present state of the technology.

The idiots are restarting Three Mile Island #1. All to power an AI data center.

Absolute insanity.

I bought a Bosch 800 series 6 years ago and love it. Bosch is a bit different from American style dishwashers. It has a screen that needs to be cleaned at least once a week. Also the heatless drying is fantastic. Mine is old enough that it doesn’t have Wi-Fi with certain features locked behind a cloud based app, which I find appallingly idiotic.

They make me feel something.

The absolute pinnacle of this is “Pacific Rim”. The first time I watched that movie I felt like an 11 year old seeing something for the first time. I was 43 when that movie came out and hadn’t felt that in a lot of years.

Honorable mention is “Star Wars The Force Awakens”. Yes, I know it’s not a great movie, but the feeling it evoked from me was close enough to how I felt when I saw “Star Wars A New Hope” first run in 1977 that I give that particular movie a pass.

I don’t care if the writing is good, or if the plot is tight, or the director sniffs unicorn farts. If the film does not evoke something from me then I just consider it time spent.

#1 choice: Pilot. Unfortunately I am legally blind in my right eye, so that precluded me from attaining an ATP license in the US. My parents absolutely forbid me to move to another country to become a pilot where the vision rules are more relaxed. I did go on to become a skydiver and attained USPA Licenses: A, C, D and Pro, along with BIC (yes I’m old and YES back in those days you did not have to attain each license in order, you could skip and I skipped getting a “B”).

#2 choice: Engineer: Sort of attained this one. I made it to my senior year for ME when circumstances (mainly my own stupidity) took me in another direction. I’ve worked in IT since ~1995 in a variety of roles. Today I manage processes, which sounds boring and it is, but I don’t have to carry a pager and I work 40hrs a week flat and that’s it. I plan to stay in this position until I retire in about 9 years.

They are very individualistic. I’ve had crows that would land on me and say hello (in crow speak) and others that would fly around me, but never really come close.

The common denominator that I have seen, if you befriend one you will friend the entire murder. The flip side of that if you piss one off, all of them are pissed off at you and that never goes away.

Crows on a few occasions. They are remarkably easy to befriend as they are highly intelligent.

Veggie Pasta

1 Red Onion diced 2 Carrots diced 1 Celery diced Fresh Mozzarella 4oz bacon 6oz fusilli pasta (My personal favorite is Dellalo) 1.5c Marinara sauce Parsley for topping

Cook the bacon to desired doneness in a 10 to 12" skillet. Personally, I like it just a bit chewy, rather than crispy.

Drain the bacon on a plate with a paper towel while you cook the veggies.

Cook the veggies until soft and browned. Add sauce and bacon and warm.

While the veggies are cooking, bring a well salted pot of water to a boil and cook the pasta per directions on the package.

Aliquot the pasta onto two plates add fresh mozz into the pasta and spread the sauce evenly between the two plates. Top with parsley.

This makes enough for two people.

Those that can’t do, teach… Those that can’t teach do HR.

Try watching this movie, it was based upon a real event:

Last Breath

My oldest brother went to work for McDonald’s, then later for Hardees as a manager. I remember how his room smelled. Like old grease and sadness. He lost feeling in his fingers due to working the grill and was working all the time.

I vowed never to work in food, ever. Now 40 years later, I still haven’t. Although for a bit different reason, as I love to cook and have made it a hobby. I would not want to make something I love to do into something I HAVE to do.

O’Hare (ORD).

When? Every time I’ve flown through it.

Longest? 20 hours… I think… My brain has tried to blank that period of time out to save my sanity.

Now I avoid flying through ORD at absolute all costs. DTW, DFW, DEN, hell even ATL are better to fly through. 3 years ago my family flew to Kauai. On the way out we connected in DEN, which went great. On the way back we had to make two stops, first at LAX, the second at ORD. We made it through LAX with no issues. Got to ORD and had a 10 hour delay. The only reason why I didn’t rent a car and drive home was due to being awake for 30 hours at that point (I don’t sleep on planes). Also, the plane was always “just one more hour away”.

Funny enough that’s what I want. No idiotic grave that will just be dug up in 25 years where my remains will be dealt with in other ways that my family would have no control over.

Just cremate me and spread my ashes above 10000ft (3050m for my more civilized friends). Then I will forever become a resident of the sky, which is my favorite place to be.

As far as my friends go… Ehhh my last TPK was with a meteor storm spell

Part whirlwind, part most stability I’ve experienced in my life, and part adjusting to a new norm.

My life in the mid 00’s was… Interesting. Mrs Canopyflyer and I met in 2004, got married in 2005, moved 400 miles for her job in 2006 and baby #1 was born in 2007.

So by 2008 I was getting used to:

1. Being a newish husband.

2. Being in a completely new city where I knew no one.

3. Being a new father.

Farscape

Yes.

The multithread Passmark score on that CPU is 13254.

That’s many times what you really need for the work you’re describing above. There are a lot of games it could play pretty easily and games are far more demanding than a Zoom call.

The 7000 series Latitudes are actually OK machines for the most part. Once in a while Dell will have a model with a problem, but not enough to really worry about. As far as storage goes, spreadsheets and the like do not take a lot of room. If you want to lug around a lot of media files, like movies and TV shows then you will run out pretty quickly. Otherwise I wouldn’t worry about it.

For my personal systems and those for my family I usually pick up older Dell laptops/towers and refurb them myself. I usually get several more years out of them. The system I’m typing this on is a Dell Precision 7550 that I rebuilt a year ago. Its predecessor was a Precision 7540 that my youngest uses to run games on and do his homework. My 7550 runs Battlefront II and BSG Deadlock easily.

9 to 10 hours a day for me.

But I work from home and work in IT. Also, my two main D&D groups play online as we’re spread out all over the country.

Japanese Literature Course. Dr John (what he liked to be called) was the professor and I had him for an English class already and liked him.

The class was not overly large, maybe 12 people and we met in a conference room rather than a typical classroom. This event was a couple of weeks into the class and Dr John was getting increasingly… Erratic… I guess is the way to describe him. The class was supposed to be more about open discussion than lecture. However, it was full of sophomores who for the most part were used to sitting for lectures. I think Dr John was getting more and more erratic during class in a hope to get the students participating. It had the opposite effect unfortunately, until he started saying some things that I thought were just wildly incorrect and I called him out on it.

I literally got a look on my face, which he noticed instantly and he asked what my opinion was… And 19 year old me replied to my doctorate level professor; “Dr John I think you’re full of shit.”

Everyone’s eyes went wide and people looked stunned, including me because it was an instinctive reaction on my part. I fully expected to get kicked out of the class, but Dr John actually smiled and asked; “Ok Mr Flyer, please explain to me just how I’m full of shit.”

And I did… At least I tried to as at the time I was just a 19 year old moron attempting to take on a middle aged man that had decades of study. What ensued for the rest of that period was he and I going back and forth. Of course he easily dismembered all of my arguments, but he was respectful and we had a real dialog going on. I felt I learned more in that one hour than the previous three semesters.

While that day helped break some of the other people out of their shells, I ended being the only person in the class that earned an “A”.