Back before Big Bowl popularized the notion of pick-and-mix stirfry, August Moon was letting you pick your protein to go with any of their stir-fry sauces. They were a local place which reviewers described as "fusion", with such fascinating concepts as "Scandinasian Stirfry". They had an astonishing variety of interesting foods, and combinations of foods. We went there to celebrate when Spider bought his house. We went there when people visited from out of town, or for any other occasion we could think of. It was at August Moon that a waitress identified a particular piece on the stereo as Herbie Hancock, leading me to expand my musical horizons quite a bit. They had local art on the walls, and lava lamps on the tables.
My own favorite dish was the Spicy Imperial stirfry, generally with beef.
August Moon burned down a while back; my vague understanding is that the abandoned laundromat next door burned down. This was some time back, and they don't seem to be coming back.
While cleaning today, I stumbled across one of the other reasons I loved that place so much: One time, when we asked for a recipe, they gave us one. Here it is:
Spicy Imperial Sauce2 tbl salad oil
1 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp ginger
1 tbl lemongrass
protein of choice
1 soup sp imperial seasoning
1 tbl fish sauce (concentrate)
1 tbl thick soy sauce
1 tbl oyster sauce
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 ladle chicken stock
1 1/2 ladle onion (julienne)
1/3 ladle scalloions (1 inch segments)Heat wok until hot, add oil, lemongrass, garlic, ginger; stir until turns half brown.
Add protein, stir, quickly add chicken stock.
Add seasoning and fish sauce, let it cook about 30 seconds.
Add thick soy, oyster, cayenne, stir until mixed, add onion and scallions after 30 seconds, stir until done (1/4 ladle of liquid remaining).
Remove to plate.
If chicken is your protein, don't include the scallions.
I have only one question about this: What is "imperial seasoning", and how would we find out?
(Note: If anyone from August Moon ever asks me to remove this, I will, but I don't think there'd be any point. The fact is, their cooks were talented enough that merely having the recipe won't enable you to make the food as well as they did.)
Wow. I mean, in theory, we knew this would happen, but it's still sort of weird. But, apparently, The God Eaters is now available for sale. That's the Powell's link. According to Bookfinder4u, it's available all over. Note that there's two different ISBN numbers for this book; one starts with "978" and ends with "3", the other omits the "978" and ends with "0". (That is to say, the last digit is a check digit; casting out nines will explain how it works.)
We still haven't heard back from the publisher we submitted Forge of Dawn to, and we aren't sure why; we haven't even gotten a rejection letter, but then, that's Jesse's curse. Jesse doesn't get rejection letters, ever; people just don't bother to write back. We don't know why.
But now that we've got a book out, it's possible that this could change; for instance, people might buy this one, giving us some basis for telling people that Jesse's writing is saleable.
This may be of some interest to folks who are inclined to ship things that have actual value.
I recently shipped a $2,400 computer via UPS. It got busted.
Round 1: UPS refuses to pay for anything on the grounds that "the package isn't damaged".
To put this in perspective, this is a double-boxed computer. One corner of the box is crumpled to a depth of about two inches; that means we're looking at crushing eight layers of cardboard (both sides and two lids, for each of the two boxes) plus the extra-stiff packing foam in that corner. They claim this isn't damage.
Fussing ensues. They agree that maybe they could pay something.
Round 2: UPS will pay the replacement price of the parts -- not labor. (Also, presumably, not the cost of getting the parts shipped, just their line item values.)
Now, this might sound initially reasonable, if you don't do much with computers. Why should they pay for labor? Indeed. Why should they? "Mr. Smith, while we are very sorry that the painting was destroyed en route to your gallery, we cannot pay this claim; we need line items for the paint and canvas, which we will reimburse you for. We estimate this picture to have components worth about $50." "While it is true that you insured this antique furniture for two thousand dollars, we are sending you instead the cost of a few pounds of lumber."
The problem here is that reductionism is not a good philosophical approach to consumer products. Imagine being someone who doesn't build computers professionally, and shipping a $700 computer you bought at a retail store. The computer shows up broken, and UPS offers to pay you $300 for replacements for specific parts. They will not replace the software bundle (writing software is "labor"), nor will they provide any assistance with getting the alleged replacement parts, or installing them.
This is, how you say, a bad policy. I am not real fond of FedEx in some other ways; for instance, about two years after I left my last job, they started sending marketing junk to the address I had on file. But that could be a legitimate mistake... And when I filed a claim with FedEx on a $3,000 computer, they paid $3,000. (They even let me have the destroyed remains, because obviously, they have no need for them.) UPS is offering to pay $1,700 for the parts, excluding the hard drives (which Seagate repaired), and wants everything else back. Presumably, they will complain if I don't carefully disassemble all the parts to produce something closer to the abstract collection of parts they seem to think is under discussion.
So, based on this: If you ship anything which might have a component value higher than the sum of the values of its components, don't use UPS. If they change their minds, I'll post an update. Just be glad they don't know that silicon is a fancy name for "sand", or they'd be sending me $0.25 per chip for the Opteron processors, on the grounds that converting raw sand into functioning chips is "labor".
Edited to add, September 13th: UPS finally paid the full claim, as though none of this ever happened.
One of my favorite cartoons, Bob the Angry Flower, turned out a bit of political commentary:
http://angryflower.com/smashi.html
There's something oddly familiar about this.
If you aren't a techie, it may not be immediately obvious how incredibly incompetent the people who maintain Windows are.
But rest assured; this is not merely the incompetence of a large company. This is the incompetence of people who make you wonder whether they're actually trying to get things wrong.
Other people have written about Windows Genuine Advantage Fuckups. My own data points are these:
1. Windows Update now goes through "svchost.exe", the Generic Process That Does Everything. What this means is that you can't set most firewalls to allow "Windows Update" but not allow "Any Program Whatsoever That Wants To Use This API". Because any program can just go ahead and ask svchost.exe to do its magic; either you let them all do it, or none of them.
2. The moment I ran Windows Genuine Advantage, to "validate" my ultra-critical security patches, my machine crashed with the Blue Screen of Death.
It's not as though my machine normally crashes. I mean, ever. I play video games, even fairly abusively high-spec ones, and everything's fine. I run it for days on end of heavy load under Linux.
But the WGA code, with its surreal combination of incoherence and needing absolute control over everything, can indeed kill it.
Way to go. Once again, I am left wondering why on earth anyone pays for Microsoft software. It appears that the hundreds of dollars I've spent on XP licenses buy me, in total, nothing at all; I'm still gonna be treated like a thief, up to and including the part where the updates act really strange or reboot my system. I still don't get any kind of customer service.
In short, MS is saddling me with all the penalties they talk about wanting for people who copy their software without paying for it.
Malice? Nah, just incompetence.
(For the record, some three reboots later, the twenty or so most recent critical security patches have been loaded. Now back to UNIX administration, where I sip a cool drink while pondering whether I ought to apply a theoretical security patch where a combination of circumstances that does not apply to any of my current customers could potentially allow someone to view data after their permission to do so has been withdrawn. It can't happen unless we acquire a set of customers who want to share a database, so it's not urgent. We haven't had an urgent issue in quite some time.)
So, Kraft's subsidiary, Gevalia, are spammers. Boy, are they spammers. They've been actively spamming the whole internet for years.
They now have an unsubscribe page.
http://www.gevalia.com/Gevalia/customerservice/spam_unsubscribe.aspx
Yes, that's right. They even call it "spam_unsubscribe". Because, see, unlike some companies, who at least feel enough shame about their abuses to lie about them, or say it's not spam, the Gevalia people know full well that what they are doing is spamming.
The page makes the usual false statements about people have "registered to receive information and promotional messages from various advertisers", but the name of the page, alone, tells the truth: It's spam. They know it's spam.
You would think that a company like Kraft, with actual products people are willing to pay for, would know better. But then, Gevalia's products don't have quite the reputation for culinary mastery that you get from, say, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
So, I finished reading some books I had lying around. And I realized that I wanted sequels.
It turns out most of the books Baen Books has put out in the last six years or so are available for purchase as ebooks from their WebScription service. Now, this service is pitched in terms of subscriptions, but you can go back and buy all the books. Most of them are between $4 and $6 -- slightly less than the cost of a paperback.
The cool thing is this: These books are delivered in your choice of document formats, within reason. HTML, for instance, makes an excellent choice.
DRM? Hell, no. You bought the book. You have a book now. No stupid restrictions. You like iSilo better than MobiPocket Reader? Convert away. The text is unencumbered.
What this means is that, for $6, I didn't just get the option of reading The Deed of Paksenarrion (one of my favorite fantasy trilogies) once. Or even "until that particular book reader isn't supported".
I have the text. I can make backup copies, I can convert to new formats. I don't have to have some kind of special key to unlock it. In short, it's like actually buying a book, not like renting one for a little while. I can read it on my computer, or on my PDA.
This is the way ebooks ought to be done, and I am glad to see someone had the vision to do it. Tragically, the man who made that vision happen is no longer with us; Jim Baen died on June 28th this year. But his legacy is with us, in a thriving science fiction industry, an ebook service that's actually worth buying from, and a number of authors who might never have made it without his interest and support.
Well, it's been a while, and I had to replace my scanner...
But here we are. 1,293 unsolicited advertising faxes. I have a database program I've been working on that will, in principle, let me file them and then search the database for faxes by remove number, or callback number, or whatever else.
What that means is, it's about time to get back to pursuing these actively. When I started this, I had maybe seven hundred faxes, give or take. I'm still getting them. I've lost count of how many suits we've settled or won at this point; it's been a lot. And they're still faxing, so it looks like I get to sue them some more.
Some people might dodge some bullets. The recent amendments to the TCPA's anti-junk-fax language create loopholes for certain abusive companies to keep sending unwanted faxes, but for the most part the faxes are still just as illegal as they were when the law first passed in 1991.
I'm also finding some old stuff worth working on; for instance, one of the companies I settled with submitted forged documents in discovery. I might have some fun looking into those in greater detail. I think just about every junk faxer I've dealt with has told at least one obvious lie in discovery answers; maybe it's time to do a review of the state of perjury in modern America.
But in any event, the faxes are nicely scanned in, and in a few days I hope to have a searchable database. I may make some of the data available online, too.
So, I get a lot of junk faxes, and I sue a lot of junk faxers. I've been planning to get organized, and one of the things I need is scans of all the faxes.
Well, I got an HP scanner with a sheet feeder, and scanned in a bunch of faxes. Then I got some new faxes, so I figured I'd just scan those in. Only the HP scanner broke after a couple hundred pages.
So I got a new scanner.
Now that I've compared them, I am shocked at how annoying the HP was. Here's a few examples:
1. Settings made to a "task", such as "scan document", tended to get lost.
2. Some settings couldn't be saved. For instance, every time I wanted to scan images, the save window wanted to save as PDF. I had to re-select TIFF format every time.
3. File naming was just plain dumb. If you had a multiple-document scan, with files named "x.tiff", you would get "x.tiff", "x01.tiff", "x02.tiff", and so on. You couldn't have a consistent numbering pattern.
4. Proprietary format means you can't just use something else, like VueScan.
5. Pretty cheap construction; I don't expect a sheet feeder to break in the first 1500 scans or so, even if it was sitting idle for a bit over a year in there.
My new scanner is an Epson "4490 Office". Which is to say, a 4490 Photo plus the document feeder attachment.
It works nicely. VueScan recognizes it and controls it without hassle. The provided software is competent and not insulting. I set it for 200dpi grayscale TIFF files, and 200dpi grayscale TIFF files is what I get. The name provided to the save gets a three-digit number appended, STARTING with 001, so all the names are in sequence and sort alphabetically, for anything under a thousand pages in a single run.
The visual quality is noticably better. I'm happy, and soon some junk faxers won't be.
(Ironically, guess whose faxes I noticed in with all my other pump-and-dump stock scams: SOYO!)