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).
Author: Andrew Huey
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.
work
I worked late pretty much every day this week, so I was really looking forward to getting out on time today. I did manage to get out just a few minutes past five, but then I hit all sorts of traffic problems, so I didn’t get home until after six anyway. Arg.
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:
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?)
Last.fm
Last.fm has a nifty little tool now that can generate a little graphic, showing what you’ve been listening to lately. Here’s mine:
Probably doesn’t look too exciting right now.
Exercise
It was such a nice day, I went out for a long walk after dinner tonight. I walked for about an hour. That’s probably the most exercise I’ve gotten since Wondercon in February. I’ve got to try to keep this up. If the weather cooperates, maybe I can get in the habit of doing this every day or so.
Samurai Champloo
I finished watching Samurai Champloo a couple of days ago. It’s a great series; nearly as good as Cowboy Bebop. I’m re-watching some of the episodes now, catching some stuff I didn’t get on the first run-through.
AMALGAM is a pretty good Samurai Champloo fansite. I stumbled across it looking for info on some of the music from the show.
NeuNeo/Helios HVD-2085
I’m thinking about picking up this DVD player from HKFlix.com. My current DVD player is pretty old, and doesn’t handle CD-Rs or DVD-Rs (or any variation thereof) at all. I really don’t need the HD stuff yet, but maybe someday it’ll come in handy.
ASP.NET 2.0
Well, it’s been about a month since I’ve done any ASP.NET 2.0 work at home. I watched a few webcasts at work over the last couple of weeks, though, so I haven’t forgotten anything. I played around with the GridView a bit tonight. Very nice. It’s really easy to put a fairly standard-looking and straightforward grid together quickly. I need to go a little deeper, though, and figure out how to do some of the weirder stuff that we typically do with the DataGrid now.