Month: April 2006

Good Friday

I took my “floating holiday” today, for Good Friday. I managed to get a few things done around the apartment. I ran out to Staples and bought a shredder. I’ve had a pile of old credit card bills and whatnot that I intended to take into work and shred on our big shredder, but I kept forgetting to bring them in, so I decided to just get a small shredder and take care of them. I had credit card bills going back to 1988 in there. Looking at them brought back some old RPI memories — eating at Holmes & Watson, picking up CDs (or casettes) at Music Shack, stuff like that. But they’re all confetti now. Goodbye 1980’s!

Meanwhile, I sent off two DVDs through Peerflix. Both were DVDs I’d gotten for free anyway, so if I can get a couple of good DVDs in return, all the better.

Peerflix

Since I’m on this whole trading kick, I decided to sign up for a Peerflix account, which is a DVD-trading service similar to Lala. They operate a little differently from Lala; trades are $1 each, like Lala, but you have to pay in advance for them, 5 at a time. And they don’t use prepaid mailers like Lala. Instead, they generate and send a two-page custom mailer to your printer. You’re supposed to put the DVD between the two pieces of paper and fold them into an envelope of sorts, which you then tape shut. I’m really not sure a DVD would survive the rigors of the Somerville post office without any padding, but I guess we’ll see how it works out.

Meanwhile, I’m ready to send out a couple of CDs via Lala, as soon as I get their mailers. And there’s one CD on the way to me already.

The one thing that bothers me a bit about both services is that they encourage you to throw out the packaging and booklets that come with CDs and DVDs. I realize it’s cheaper to mail that way, but my collector mentality just thinks it’s wrong to toss that stuff out. There’s stuff I’d never put up on Lala or Peerflix, just because I couldn’t bear to toss out the packaging and/or booklets. I guess I’ll have to stick with eBay for that kind of stuff.

Risotto

I took a shot at making risotto tonight. It turned out OK, but not great. The rice wasn’t quite the right consistency, but it tasted good. I’m not sure if I screwed something up, or if the rice I was using just wasn’t good. Either way, I’m definitely going to try again at some point.
I basically made up my own recipe, using this random recipe and this Alton Brown recipe as a basis, along with this very useful page of general information. I saw the Good Eats episode on risotto quite some time ago, and I’ve been meaning to try it since then.
Just for future reference, I used mushrooms, asparagus, vegetable stock, Pinot Grigio, and fontina cheese, along with the other obvious ingredients (rice, onion, etc).

spyware

I bought CounterSpy about a year ago. I used it on my home PC for awhile, but I started having problems with it at some point and uninstalled it. It’s always worked fine on my laptop, though, so I figured it was probably something with the machine itself. Well, I’ve since replaced almost every part in that machine and reinstalled XP. I’ve been meaning to reinstall CounterSpy and try it out again, but I haven’t had the time. I just realized that the one-year license was almost up, so I figured I should install it, see if it worked, and decide whether or not to renew the license. I gave it a shot, and, unfortunately, it appears to have screwed up my machine again. I had to uninstall it. I like the guys at Sunbelt, so I feel kind of bad about abandoning CounterSpy, but they just don’t seem to have gotten their act together enough to produce a solid product that’ll work on my computer without any trouble.

I’ve been looking around at other anti-spyware packages. PC Magazine has some good stuff on anti-spyware software. Spy Sweeper seems to be pretty popular, and well-reviewed. Really, I’m careful enough with my own computer that I probably don’t need anti-spyware software, but it still seems like a good idea to have something. I could also just stick with Spybot S&D, which is pretty good for a free program.

Eisner Awards

CBR has an article listing all the Eisner award nominees. Although I’m way behind in my reading, I have actually read a few of these books, and I’m planning on reading several more. I’ve never actually gone to the Eisner awards ceremony at the San Diego con; there’s always something else going on at the same time that I’m more interested in. Maybe this year I’ll go.

silly test

I took a little “indie music test” and it came back with this:

i am open-minded!


How indie are you? test by ridethefader

You’re pretty knowledgeable about music in general. You like indie music, sure, but that’s only part of it.
You’ll listen to any old shit as long as it sounds good to you. You’re not snobby about music at all, you
just like what you like. How boring. Curiously, this makes you popular with the opposite sex.

(Can you tell I’m screwing around right now, waiting for a big download to finish?)