The Misadventures of Phildopus

Trash Can Omlette

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 17:38:26 GMT

I decided that since it is Christmas Eve, and I'm going to be all over the place for the next week or so, it would be prudent to go ahead and use up some leftovers that were lingering in the fridge. I wanted an omlette. Usually, a key ingredient of my omlettes is onion. I didn't have any onion. I do have onion powder. It sits in my spice cabinet and compacts into a solid, and whenever I want to use it I have to bang the jar on the counter until I can get it to return into powder form. Since I was in the spice cabinet anyway, I decided just stopping at onion powder would not make up for the lack of onion, so I included a lot of other stuff, as well.

Here is everything I put in:

Tofurkey italian sausage. I'm never buying these again. They are expensive and remind me of chef boyardee meatballs, except worse.

Some leftover Archer Farms whole wheat shells with gouda, cheddar, and porcini mushrooms. This was pretty good, but like Rita said, it still tasted like it came out of a box. Adding some water with this and the spices actually made a fairly nice sauce.

Mushrooms. I imagine they would have gone bad if not eaten within the next week.

Publix Thin Sliced Honey Ham. I had gotten it to go on sandwiches with some deli mustard, but the ham is so tasteless that the mustard completely overshadows it. No, I didn't put any of the mustard in the omlette.

Pepperoni. It was there. I wasn't trying to use it up or anything. It crisped up nice and provided a little bit of animal fat that the tofurkey sausage was lacking.

Spinach. Lots of spinach. It was also for the deli mustard sandwiches with hint of ham.

Raisins. I have two giant tubs of them because they were on special at Publix a couple months ago. My misgivings about raisins and cheese were allayed after this adventure.

Spices: onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, crushed red pepper, coarsely ground black pepper, thyme, rosemary, basil, parsley, ginger, red curry powder. Why not?

Since the filling had its own sauce and was a little too big to actually put inside of an omlette, I decided to put it on top and to the side instead. The omlette itself was made of two eggs, cheddar, swiss, parmesan, and a grated Italian cheese mix.

Despite the all the disparate ingredients, it actually tasted pretty good.

Giant Tea

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 17:16:15 GMT

This is slightly amusing and not very newsworthy. I bought a giant latte mug from which to eat soup at work, and then I decided to make a cup of tea. I have a picture of it beside a Mac keyboard. Yeah, I told you it wasn't very interesting.

The Best Yukos Review Ever

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 04:26:29 GMT

Yes.
There's a drum roll. There's another one. There's a stop-start kind of verse. There's an interesting arrangement of unusual instruments. There's a melodramatic, almost musical-theatre vocal delivery. There's high drama. There's a trumpet. There are voices and voices. There's a sudden funky work out. There's hand claps. There's a dancing horse. There's a fly past. There's applause. There's a huge distorted guitar outro. There is everything a person could possibly want in three and a half minutes.

I could criticise. The vocals are a bit low in the mix. The whole sound is a little muddy. The bit where the death metal singer joins Beirut and gets into a heated Deerhoof jam is traumatic for the indie kids. But there's no point in criticising really because here is a band that's way past all that. Way past.

I like this very very very much.

Annoying Maintenance People

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:31:56 GMT

There is an access door to the utility hallway thing in the back of the office, and maintenance people have been coming in and out of here to get to it today. Now, there's some old guy with a beard just sitting in a chair in the back and staring. It's pretty damned unnerving.

They've been about this floor all week, it seems. Yesterday, they were demolishing something in one of the rooms and it seemed like they were purposely making as much noise as they could. My boss said that one of the guys had a couple of hammers and was walking up and down the hallway clanging them together, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that people were actually working.

Testing!

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 20:43:50 GMT

It's time to find out if this new journaling thing works. My paid livejournal account expired, and I don't feel like shelling out $20 per year to be able to embed my journal into my website when I don't post but once every couple of months or so.

My solution: I found myself a php script that parses RSS feeds. It's supposed to be able to read rss feeds from remote urls, but phpwebhosting.com has turned that option off in their php options. So, I have a cron job that downloads the rss feed from livejournal every 15 minutes.

EDIT: Well, there's no accounting for annoying "features" in livejournal's editing page, but it worked.

I don't know what license the script was released with, if any, but in the spirit of open source, I'm including a link to my modified version in case someone else wants to use this to embed their livejournal into their website. Thanks Richard James Kendall!

Download

Where is NoGodStuff???

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 18:37:03 GMT

Dead as a doornail. The nogodstuff.com domain expires on March 28, and I don't feel like messing with it anymore. Taking the place as primary domain on the hosting service is phildop.us, which is sticking around for at least another 9 months or so. If I get a lot of complaints, I may put nogodstuff up on a subdomain or something, but there are some really good personals sites out there that have far surpassed anything that I ever planned for nogodstuff. OkCupid comes to mind. They give you the option to set religious restrictions on your matching if you REALLY only want to be matched with atheists and agnostics, but if you're fairly intelligent and open-minded, you'll probably be matched with intelligent and open-minded people, so even that's not really all that necessary.

Because I feel like spouting out random useless junk

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 23:52:36 GMT

I tried to install the real AOL Instant Messenger client the other day just because I was in windows and Gaim 2.0beta1 was leaving me slightly irate. In the process, AIM nearly crashed my computer. AIM, which was never a great program but wasn't horrible back in the day, is now a complete piece of shit. I thought AOL learned their lesson about putting out slow, buggy software back when they let Nullsoft release Winamp 3. Maybe they don't care about making a quality product now that Gaim and Trillian are making better clients. I could have sworn that back in the day, they tried their hardest to shake off Trillian by changing the protocol at least once a month. So anyway, what I wound up doing was installing Gaim 2.0beta2 and I found out they had fixed (almost) everything that was annoying me. This concludes the pointless glossy cyber shit for the evening.

Tomorrow is Singles Awareness Day. Thank you Hallmark for making single people everywhere feel like there's something wrong with them. Die, Hallmark. Die.

well fuck me silly

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 21:51:33 GMT

Up until a little over a month ago, I lived TWO BLOCKS AWAY from a recording equipment store. Why didn't I know? Why did I have to find this out from an Australian website? 205 South Prospect St. is right off of Rosewood according to Google Maps. I walked right past the damned place many a time and didn't even know it was there.

I'm getting up in only a few hours to watch a building implode.

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 08:27:30 GMT

When I was in 11th grade, I participated in the USC band clinic. The Carolina Plaza building was the first thing I saw as I went up the steps from the Coliseum to the Koger Center. The whole thing was strangely dramatic and I largely consider it the beginning of my USC experience.

What I didn't realize at the time was that the building was largely a waste of space long before then (they had ripped out all the toilets for some reason) and it would have been much simpler to cross Assembly Street via the crosswalk instead of through the tunnel.

My Neglected Livejournal

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 21:32:51 GMT

I haven't felt particularly motivated to write anything here. I don't know if it's because I don't care or that most of the things that I would normally write about are things that not everyone should hear.

Basically, I feel like I'm being stifled at every turn.

That is all.

Well, It's Done

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 02:29:04 GMT

Okay. Things have gotten worse and then better since the last update. I've moved into an apartment with some nice people in West Columbia. I got a cold while moving, and it was absolutely horrible because of the stress. Pretty much everything is moved.

My server is no more. Phildop.us is now being hosted from the same space as nogodstuff.com, and I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the Yukos repository. I pretty much need some form of online storage, but what I've seen so far is too costly for my budget. Right now, there's a little less than 12 GiB. I guess I could burn a shitload of dvd-roms and distribute them to all the members of the band. I suppose, though, that our new mode of production is going to be different, and the repository won't be as necessary. It was originally made so that Tob, Burrack, and I could record our individual parts in our respective homes and then they'd be stored in one central location. But now that we're going to be using the new recording equipment, I guess it's all going to be in one place anyway.

Time for Pint Night.

I don't know what to do.

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 07:18:00 GMT

The time to panic draws near.

My lease now runs out on the 31st thanks to a two-week extension, and I have three days left to tell the landlord I need another one, all the while I'm being told that the later I stay, the more likely it is that I will just be kicked out.

I don't want to live alone anymore because it is taxing on my sanity and my bank account. I only decided to live alone a year ago because everyone else I knew was situated at the time.

Now, there is a kind of opening. Unfortunately, it depends on the coordination of a lot of factors, but there's a horrible breakdown in communication between these factors (which is actually the reason there is this opening in the first place). This breakdown is causing a major slowdown, and I'm running out of time. I need details and I need them soon (like in the next two days). If this falls through, I'm screwed, because I don't know of anyone else who is actually looking for a place and/or roommates right now.

This is bad. This is horrendously bad.

Damn and Blast

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 04:07:35 GMT

Just when I get the urge to finally start on the new feature on my website, I remember that my webserver is on the blink. Earlier today I was hearing a weird popping noise and some whirring. It turned out to be my server. Damn and blast and damn again. It's probably a fan. It may even be the power supply. That server is great and all, but...no it isn't. It's too old of a computer to be particularly useful. If I try to run anything other than a standard php webserver, it slows down to an absolute crawl.

So, what was the new feature? Well, I want to start doing album reviews. Sure, I'd just be cluttering the internet with more useless opinions about music, but some people actually read that useless clutter, and maybe I'll help someone check out some album they wouldn't have looked at otherwise.

But alas, I have to get the server back up somehow. It's times like these I wish I had a computer graveyard to scour through.

CD Rot

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 02:04:59 GMT

I've lost my first cd to cd Rot. Apparently, the reflective material oxidizes, and this is what has happened to my copy of Incantations by Mike Oldfield. The scary thing is that this happened between the time I last listened to the actual cd and tonight. I'm not sure when that last time was. It could have been anywhere from six months to two years. I bought it during my freshman year in college, and that was only four or five years ago. Strangely, my copy of QE2 (coincidently also by Mike Oldfield), which is probably the oldest cd I own on account of it being used, is fine, and that thing has to be at least 15 years old.

I have Incantations ripped somewhere. The trouble is that it's in a lossy format (specifically 160 kbps variable-bitrate ogg vorbis). That's the thing about lossy formats. I don't rip my cds to have backup copies. I rip them to have a temporary version that I can listen to on my computer. That's my attitude where mp3s and such are concerned. It wasn't always, and subsequently I have a lot of cds made from lossy formats. But then, I know in my heart these are only temporary extensions of my mp3 collection into the physical world only to be used while I'm driving. My ultimate goal is to eventually buy them (if I like them).

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I'm going to have to buy a new copy of this cd because my only other copy of it is in an inferior format. This also makes me wonder if I shouldn't rip all my cds to FLAC and then make multiple copies of the collection onto numerous data dvds of varying brands and then keep them in an airtight vault somewhere. Is this overreacting? It just seems like there is no such thing as long-term data storage, and that's really damned scary.

Getting the hang?

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 03:26:37 GMT

Flickr blogging...hmm.

Well...

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 01:42:51 GMT

Obviously, Flock has some "power user" problems.

Sure, I could edit that last entry to make it less ugly, but then it wouldn't serve as an example of what work needs to be done.

Untitled

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 21:37:04 GMT

Hmm..trying out href="http://www.flock.com" which is a social web browser type thing based on Firefox. It let me import my href="http://del.icio.us" bookmarks and now I'm updating my livejournal from it. Apparently I can upload pictures to href="http://www.flickr.com" from it, as well... I can't seem to edit the title of this entry, though.
I'm not sure if this is better or easier than just using Firefox with a bunch of extensions, del.icio.us rss feeds, and web interfaces.

Hmm....

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 22:41:13 GMT

At what point does one get sick of hot dogs?

That's all I've eaten meal-wise since Monday. I guess I can ease up once the cole slaw runs out.

I also wonder how long you can keep pre-grilled hot dogs in the freezer.

I get the feeling that I'm going to have to make some sort of Hot Dog Surprise Casserole at some point. Is it really a surprise, though, if I'm the one cooking it for my own consumption? And what else does one put in a hot dog casserole besides hot dogs? Is that where the surprise comes in? Is it possible to hop on over to Publix and ask for a big ol' bag of Publix Brand Surprise? What would they give me? Expired lettuce, onion bread, and chitterlings? Actually, I've never seen chitterlings at Publix...not that I would willingly such things. I've also never seen meat in containers bigger than a pound and a half. It's such an uppity little grocery store.

Stacks and Stacks

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 04:22:11 GMT

This past weekend, I decided that it was time to reunite my store-bought cds with their proper cover art and jewel cases and have them somewhere a little more more accessible than in a cd suitcase. What I came to realize as multiple stacks of jewel cases formed on my living room floor and then got transferred to an assortment of cd towers and other organizational racks is that I have a shit-ton of albums. Also, having this huge array of paper, plastic, and laser-readable foil within such close proximity of a stereo is seems to be quite satisfying. Sure, having all the music sitting on a hard-drive somewhere is satisfying in some way, as well, but somehow there is something missing...tactile response, maybe? How did people feel about cassette tapes compared to records? Speaking of records, I need to figure out how to get that ancient turntable that is sitting in multiple pieces running again...

Speaking of albums, I've come across another enjoyable webcomic. It always makes me happy to stumble across a webcomic that I've missed somehow and get lost in its archives for a while. This time, it's Questionable Content. Within the archives of this one, I've pretty much managed to relive Burrack's and my album purchases over the past three years or so and have probably found some more artists worth looking into in the process. The story and characters are good and recognizable...sometimes a little too recognizable. It's proof that indie kid drama is ubiquitous...or something.

I guess while I'm plugging good webcomics, Girly is nice and absurd.

Torchwood?

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 20:45:57 GMT

Apparently, Russell T. Davies is making a more adult-oriented spinoff from Doctor Who called Torchwood, which will follow the adventures of Captain Jack Harkness as he leads some sort of investigation team. Sounds like RTD is ripping off Joss Whedon, to me, as this premise is sounding an awful lot like Angel.

RTFA and STFU, n00b! ROFLOL!

Did I just type that?

Blogs

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 18:20:40 GMT

People rag on blogs being written by people you don't know about things no one cares about or that people want their 15 minutes of fame. To counter these arguments, I don't really care if anyone ever reads my journal. It really isn't a big deal. I chose to do the livejournal thing because I actually enjoy writing stuff on occasion. I'm not a journalist, and I'm not a writer, and I don't really care about being either. I'm not famous, and I don't care if I ever am, and even if I did, blogging would not be the way by which I would want to get famous.

Some prefer to call the act of blogging clogging because it clogs the internet up with false leads in searches. Anyone who reads up on a few good search tips or google hacks or whatever can bypass the clusterfuck of blogs almost entirely. Sometimes, blogs are the only place you can find any information about something incredibly obscure. They are just as useful as anything else on the internet, and there's some pretty useless shit out there, like those damned porn sites that aren't really porn sites but are instead just links to other porn sites that aren't porn sites.

The Product of Boredom

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 05:57:01 GMT

I'm decently bored at the moment. It's supposed to be Fi's birthday, and Brandon's in town, as well, but if there are any festivities going on tonight, I don't know about them.

I just cooked some fish sticks and french fries because Chef Boyardee let me down only a few hours after dinner. I'm watching the first disc of Firefly again because it's the only thing I have to watch at the moment. Serenity comes out next Friday.

So, I was checking one of my email accounts that is riddled with spam and decided it might be fun to be completely unoriginal and make commentary about the spam subject headers.

Hiya,, cam queen
uhh...you're giving me the karate-chop with bad grammar AND you're calling me a cam queen? My webcam hasn't even worked properly for at least a couple of years.

Need Medication Quickly?
Well, I'm not in tip-top health, but I think I'm doing alright for medication...and don't call me Quickly.

Want more sleep?
Sleep is nice. Dreaming is fun most of the time. Sure, I'd love more sleep.

What up, ,how you doing
Is that a question? Are you calling me What Up? What does that even mean?

her fetish kit
Fetish kits are kinky, I guess. I've never heard of the term, but it sounds like it has lots of fun-having potential. What's in your fetish kit?

A Top stock to Consider Right Now?
Once again, is that a question? Is that an answer? Is there importance in the capitalization?

Private Medication
A bottle of whiskey.

Hi, Im Brooke, come visit my reality site!
So, now my name is Im Brooke. Someone has set up a site where there is reality? Holy fuck! Does that mean that everything else is fake?

will she gargle everyones cum?
This is the question that will be on the minds of everyone for the next several millenia. The other question is "Uncle Bob, what was an apostrophe?"

Get your drugs cheaper online
Sure thing. I'll do that right after I get that penis pump for the fetish kit, since it'll probably cause me to be impotent and then I'll need viagra.

Hiya,,my new cam schedule
Oh, it's you again...and you've already forgotten my name. Is "my new cam schedule" a term of endearment? I'm feeling quite endeared, karate-chop spammer.

Beautiful Brooke Skye is here!
Hooray!!! Who the hell is she?

Quality Credit Loans made simple
Made simple what? Scones?

pain killers now
As opposed to pain killers five minutes ago or pain killers next tuesday. It's a documentary.

Nominate for Ph.d award
What? Nominate who or what? Besides that, isn't a Ph.D. more of a degree and less of an award?

%FB_SUB2,.,,,...bottle
Okay. You let your cat type at least half of this email.

Re: Account # 19191D
How did you know my account number? Are you from the bank? Would you like my PIN while you're at it?

looking for love or just play
Just play what? The Bootie song? Wow that's a stupid song.

Beautiful Brooke Skye is here!
Again?!? Hooray again!!! However, that still doesn't explain who the hell she is.

The XXX Prize, find out which girl next door wins!
Either these spammers come up with the most creative names for their recipients, or they just have really horrible grammar. Hi! My name is The XXX Prize! There's more than one girl next door? I must admit that I haven't really met my neighbors, but I was under the impression that there was only one girl living next door. Does that mean that she wins by default?

Massive Bukkake Facials
Followed by the Big Ol' Dirty Sanchez mudbath.

Cindy will hook up on the first date
Good for her.

Girls With Cigarettes
What about them? What are they doing with said cigarettes? I hope they're making funny faces while they stick them in their ears and up their noses. That would be amusing if I had that sort of sense of humour.

XXX! You chose the winner!
I did? Am I Vin Diesel now? Great. Well, that explains my total lack of talent.

college super models born with small titties
Was this a headline on the front page of the Gamecock the other day?

Okay. That was one page worth of spam subjects. If you made it this far, you've won the XXX Prize. It's a prestigious title, I've heard. Many girls next door aspire for it, apparently. Congratulations.

Someone went through a lot of trouble

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 18:27:21 GMT

My bathroom was apparently painstakingly designed so that no matter what corner an object is in, if it falls, it is going to wind up in the toilet. It's absolutely amazing. I opened up the medicine cabinet, and out popped a tube of antibiotic cream. It fell into the sink, curved around the bottom, went back up into the air, and fell perfectly in the center of the toilet bowl.

Spam

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 18:14:18 GMT

I've been getting a lot of spam that's going directly to my gmail account. I never give my gmail address to anyone except real people (friends and family), instead opting for my spam account (which forwards to my gmail account, but it just makes it so that I have the option of forwarding it elsewhere if it becomes cumbersome). So here's the deal: someone gave out my gmail account on a form somewhere on the internet, and whoever runs that form sold my address to a spamming company.

I'm not pointing fingers. Hell, I may have slipped and done it myself. However, I have a request: if at any point you find yourself putting my email address in a form anywhere on the internet outside of your email (like on a "send to a friend" form or something along those lines), please use philspam [AT] headofphil.net. That's my public (spam) address. Don't worry. I'll more than likely still get it.

Kill Drupal! Kill Drupal NOW!

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 00:43:02 GMT

Hi, Livejournal. I've neglected you. Apparently there are a lot of paid features that I really should start using...

Soon, you'll be embedded in my website again, as you should be, and that mean and nasty Drupal-ized phildop.us will be eradicated from the face of the internet.

I must ask one favor of you, though, my dear, sweet Livejournal: I have to backfill you with those horrible blog posts I made in Drupal. I hope you won't hate me for it.

Hi, everyone else. If you had the misfortune to stumble upon my website (phildop.us) any time in the last month, I'm sure you noticed it was looking rather canned and ridiculously over-featured. There shall be no more of that nonsense. I was playing around with it just to see what I could do with it. I thought maybe if everything was automated, it would be all fancy and whatnot, but quite honestly, I'd rather implement any features on a website myself...well, except for the blog. Livejournal has been continuously reliable since I got my first account four years ago, so I'd rather just keep it and not mess with anything else.