Over the past week I’ve overindulged a bit. Steakhouse last friday with friends, pizza Saturday, then a dinner out with Michael on Monday to celebrate my getting the new job.

To celebrate we ended up a the Road House Grille in Skippack. Michael went for the steak, but I was impressed with their seafood selection and ordered a seafood pasta (Jumbo Lump Crab Meat, Shrimp & Scallops with Fresh Basil & CherryTomatoes in a Roasted Red Pepper Cream Sauce over Black Fettuccine). It was a delicious meal, and there was so much seafood on my plate! Possibly more than actual pasta. Yum. But after dinner I was so full of rich food I decided it was time to take off of eating out for a few days ;)

When we went grocery shopping on Tuesday I picked up the ingredients that I needed to try a few new meals, one of them was Tandoori Chicken, which we had last night:

First I had to prepare the Tandoori Marinade:

3/4 cup low fat plain yoghurt
2 tablespoons peanut oil
1/4 cup finely minced onion
2 teaspoons minced ginger root
2 teaspoons minced garlic
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
2 teaspoons ground bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1/2 teaspoon red pepper powder

Just mixed all these ingredients together. Then put the 1 pound of skinned chicken breasts in the dish, covered and marinated in the refrigerator for a few hours. After a few hours I took it out of the refrigerator and put it all into an 8×8 baking dish with 2 tablespoons of melted butter. Put it in the oven, uncovered, at 400F for 15 minutes, then lowered it to 350 for another 25 minutes.

When it was done I was surprised to see how it had gone from a nice creamy sauce to a more watery one. I prepared some parboiled rice to go with it, but since the sauce wasn’t creamy it ended up being runny and a bit to spicy for that type of rice (which isn’t dry enough to soak up the liquid). I also made up some Onion Kulcha, but that didn’t come out too well, probably because I don’t have a cast iron skillet to cook it properly, and again, with the watery sauce it didn’t make a very good side. How disappointing! At least the chicken was good, I just need to find better sides.

We also picked up a box of No Pudge brownie mix. I’m not really into the whole “No fat” “Low fat” thing, rather disillusioned to the growing national obesity rate when we have more fat reduced/free foods than ever. So I always eat fat full things and know full well what I’m putting in my body. But hey, these no-pudge brownies had a cute pig on the cover and we were buying yoghurt (the only thing you add to the brownie mix) anyway, so we decided to give them a shot.

I made them up last night (except I used the low fat yogurt I bought for the Tandoori Chicken, so they’re “low fat” instead of “non-fat”) the verdict? They aren’t the same as normal brownies, have a darker chocolate taste to them and it seems like something is missing. But they are yummie chewy and great for being low in fat.

I hope google doesn’t become evil, they do so many cool things.

On Tuesday they launched maps.google.com/ for the US. It’s got the best maps I’ve ever seen online. And they’re so slick! Not done with flash or java, it’s a very impressive piece of web craftsmanship. I want to box up it’s excellence and keep it all to myself! I spent quite a lot of time last night playing around with the maps.

I got my latest box of books from O’Reilly, and one of the books is the Second Edition of Google Hacks. It’s so much different than the first! The first spent a lot of time focusing on the Google API (which is great, I use it now in R2D2, but the second edition goes into less programming oriented things and more images, news, groups, and gmail! I dove into the gmail section as soon as I got the book.

I knew about GmailFS, the linux filesystem for gmail, but I didn’t know about GmailDrive. So I tried out GmailFS but couldn’t get it running (I’m sure I’ll figure it out, it was written with Debian in mind and Gentoo might do something different with mounting, or python script placing, or something…). I then thought I’d give Gmail Drive a shot, so I booted into Windows.

All you do is download the zip, extract, and run the .exe. You’re then presented with:

Oh, it can’t be this easy.

But it is! Just type in your username and password, and you have a gmail “drive” as seen here. Then you can move files to the “GmailDrive” like any other drive, within limitations. Since it stores the files as attachments there is a filesize limitation, and there is a filename length limit as week.

I moved an mp3 and one of the default images that comes with XP onto the GmailDrive (see here). Then logged into gmail: see. I opened up the “mail” that had the Sunset.jpg: see. Just like a normal attachment! Very cool.

What’s the point? Well none really, I don’t need more storage space, and there are probably tons of security concerns. It was just a geeky fun thing to do %)

Yesterday, while we were our shopping, called us an invited us to a “Super Bowl Party” at our friends Barry and Rae’s place.

Since we were in the area anyway, we went to Whole Foods to pick up some cheeses to bring to the party. We picked up some: Black Mountain Cheese (UK), Wallace & Gromit’s Wensleydale (UK), and Chimay Cheese (Belgium). Mmm cheese! Also picked up an herb and garlic cheese spread, a couple types of crackers, some sesame bread and tomato hummus. When I got home I put it all on a platter and around 6 we headed over to our friend’s place.

The Super Bowl was on TV, but no one was watching it the whole time, most of us played games. Uno, Disney Trivia, Scrabble. The cheese went over well and we all had a nice time. It was nice to see everyone.

This morning I had a job interview. It took about a half hour, during which I learned a great deal more about the position, and was confident that the job would suit me. It’s just an office job, but I can use my brain! And it’s for a big company, which the woman interviewing me said there was much room to grow within. That’s what I wanted to hear.

After the interview I called the temp agency and told them I was interested in taking the job if they’d hire me, and this afternoon I got a call back saying that I start on February 14th. It’s still through the temp agency, and technically it is a temp job, but it’s an indefinite assignment and most of the jobs the temp agency sends there end in hiring. Yay!

After reading an entry of escapenguin’s, I was reminded that there was a Doom3 installer for Linux.

I remember when the installer was released, a few of my Swede friends were all excited. But I never bothered installing it because I already had it running in Windows and I didn’t want to deal with it (installing non-native games in Linux can be a serious pain). So I never bothered until yesterday morning when I thought I’d “give it a shot.”

Turns out it is really easy.

In Gentoo:

emerge games-fps/doom3

Which installs a file similar to: ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/doom3/linux/doom3-linux-1.1.1286.x86.run

In Gentoo it installs the game into /opt/doom3/ (in other distros the .run file installs it to /usr/local/games/doom3/ so you’d need to edit these directions accordingly).

Once that is installed, you need to copy over a few files from the cds:

From CD 1: cp /mnt/cdrom/Setup/Data/base/pak002.pk4 /opt/doom3/base/

From CD 2: cp /mnt/cdrom/Setup/Data/base/pak000.pk4 /opt/doom3/base/
From CD 2: cp /mnt/cdrom/Setup/Data/base/pak001.pk4 /opt/doom3/base/

From CD 3: cp /mnt/cdrom/Setup/Data/base/pak003.pk4 /opt/doom3/base/
From CD 3: cp /mnt/cdrom/Setup/Data/base/pak004.pk4 /opt/doom3/base/

Done!

I logged in as my normal user and started the game with: doom3

Sys_Error: Unable to initialize OpenGL

OH NO!

So I hit the Gentoo Forums, all I needed to do was run my xsession in 24bit rather than 16, a simple change in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Now it works! Yay! From start to finish I only spent about 45 minutes on this (including the time it takes for my old cdrom to transfer the files from cd to harddrive, which took at least 20 minutes).

It runs at least as well as it does in Windows, I haven’t run into any of the jitteriness I saw in Windows, and later I’m going to try turning the graphics up higher to see how it handles it.

Well damn, now I need a new project.

Average earnings per day: $1.59

Total for week: $10.35

As I had suspected, my daily earnings increased when I started taking the time to carefully place ads on pages where I believed people might actually click, rather than mindlessly including them on all pages.

We’ll have to see how this progresses, if this is how much I’ll be making weekly, excellent! I really could cover hosting costs for both princessleia.com and wallaceandgromit.net with this revenue.

Yesterday and b2s “kidnapped” me so I wouldn’t be home alone all day. It was fun. We ended up going to a Lone Star Steakhouse for lunch with (had planned on going to Outback, but apparently they aren’t open for lunch). They have tastey chicken sandwiches. Afterwards mj went back to work and the rest of us went to a bookstore, stopped at the liquor store, and then went back to their place to hang out for a bit.

Around 6 we left to go to and ‘s place for movie night. We spent most of the night playing Sceneit? and drinking. I had a few of Bae’s tastey-secret-recipe vanilla Dr Pepper drinks, and was pretty toasted through the second half of the game (and did better that way). Michael showed up just after 11, and we stayed until a little after 1.

When I got home I brushed my teeth and went right to bed. Probably should have had more water, I felt awful this morning ;) I’m better now, it was worth it.

An ‘Ogg’ is a tactical maneuver from the network game ‘Netrek’ that has entered common usage in a wider sense…

Vorbis, on the other hand is named after the Terry Pratchett character from the book Small Gods. – http://www.xiph.org/xiphname.html

After reading Small Gods a few months back I wondered where they got the names. Nanny Ogg is a character in the Discworld series and so is Vorbis, coincidence? Today I finally took the time to look it up.

Last week, while waiting in a lobby, I picked up a magazine and started flipping through it. I came upon an article about a blogger who signed up with “Google Adsense” and today makes $150/day off of advertising on his popular blog, this was enough for him to quit his day job. Wow, cool, I certainly don’t have the kind of traffic that’ll pull down $150/day, but I do get my fair share.

This past weekend I signed up for Google Adsense. You get paid per click, based on a secret formula. I threw ads up on a bunch of my website pages to see what would happen. Do people actually click these things? The short answer is yes, some do. Of all the ads I put up about 0.7% clicked through. And how much did I make from Saturday-Thursday? $3.27 so far (see report).

Now I’m working on fine-tuning it. Google doesn’t automatically tell you which sites people click through links on, but you can set it up to monitor up to 60 specific pages for clicking activity, which I’m going to start doing. I don’t want ads that are completely irrelavant to my page topics there, and although google is usually pretty smart, the ad for eyeliner on my Lilo splash screen how-to was a bit much, so I took it down. I also took down a bunch that I figured people visiting my page wouldn’t be interested in, which made almost my entire “computers” section of my site ad free. Most of my “writing” pages still have ads, and I kept all ads on WallaceAndGromit.net, because they are all on topic and I think people would honestly be interested in them (even I’m interested in them, it’s all for cool wallace and gromit merchandise! I suspect a majority of my money comes from it.).

Google doesn’t send a check until you get up to $100, so it’ll be a long time before I receive a check in the mail, but this is a fun project. Google Adsense is neat!

Something that is not so neat is President Bush. I wasn’t going to listen to the State of the Union address because without much intoxication I knew it would just piss me off. But we left PLUG last night, and got in the car just in time for it to come on NPR. Sigh. Well I was right about it upsetting me, I HATE THAT GUY! Rawr.

Michael left this morning and will be gone until late tomorrow night at a mountain retreat with work. It’s nice to have some time completely alone I guess, but sleeping alone sucks. Tomorrow some friends are “kidnapping” me for the day, and then we’ll go to movie night, which should be fun, I won’t be stuck at home all alone for another day %)

It’s lateish, I should find something for dinner.

Since I have cut beef out of my diet again I decided it’s time to once again expand my dinner menu. Right now we eat:

Tacos: homemade soft tortilla shells, refried beans or Morningstar Farms meatless crumbles, lettuce, tomato, chedder cheese, sour cream.

Spaghetti: homemade tomato sauce, cooked pasta, parmesean cheese, side salad, garlic bread

Cheese Ravioli homemade tomato sauce, cheese ravioli, side salad, garlic bread

Spinach Lasange: no boil lasangne noodles, homemade tomato sauce, mozerella, ricotta, spinach, egg

Rice and Vegetables: Rice, Parma Rosa sauce packet for rice, steamed veggies (generally broccoli and green beans), fresh biscuits

Swordfish Steaks: Swordfish steaks, cooked in a frying pan with garlic and butter sauce, mashed potatoes

Baked Potatoes: Baked potatoes, sour cream, cheddar cheese, chives, steamed broccoli.

Boca Burgers: Boca burgers and rolls, swiss, lettuce, tomato, onion, condiments, french fries or macaroni and cheese

Chicken & Broccoli Manicotti: Cooked manicotti, chicken, broccoli, cream of chicken soup, bread crumbs, egg, Colby-Monterey Jack cheese, milk

And then we have pizza once a week or so, usually on Friday with friends. So 10 meals. It gets a bit boring, and when my main courses get boring I look for other foods to entertain my tastebuds, which is usually a deliciously fattening dessert. Bad!

When I went to a used bookstore with a couple friends on friday I hit the cookbook section. I’ve browsed online for recipes in the past, but never had very much luck, there are just too many recipe sites, and too many people contributing, it’s impossible to sort the good from the bad, and very hard to just browse through a bunch of different types recipes. So I figured I could pick up a few cookbooks to give me some direction. I browsed for a bit and picked up The Art of Cooking for Two, which has a few recipes I might try, like “Kidnapper’s Cassorole” and “Baked Broccoli Egg Supper” and “Chicken Tandoori.” It also has some easy fish recipes, which is cool since usually I just cover fish in garlic and butter and cook it in my frying pan, which is delicious, but only one meal. I also picked up Sunset’s Vegetarian Cookbook. This is probably my favorite purchase, I’ve found a bunch of recipes in here that I’d like to try. But when I picked it up my friends said “eww” … and I don’t blame them, look at the cover (click to enlarge):

What is that disgusting looking roll thing? There are tons of delicious recipes inside the book, and photos that are MUCH more colorful and appetizing. Strange that they picked that one, perhaps they are trying to keep the vegetarian cooking secrets! But it is a great cookbook, I’m looking forward to making some Mushroom-crust Quiche, Sesame Tofu Sticks and Cheddar cheese popovers, yum!

For many years I had self-esteem problems. It’s a pretty common thing, especially for geeks, so I don’t feel so bad about admitting it anymore.

Since leaving high school in 1999 I’ve tried to overcome the self-esteem issues. I had a breakthrough almost 4 years ago when recovering from a bad breakup, for a couple months I spent time focusing on how great I am, and built my self esteem up to a point to which I could finally be passed off as normal. This change in self-esteem has touched all aspects of my life and relationships, and in the past couple years I’ve gone even further, and today I can easily say that I’m very proud of myself and happy with how I’ve “turned out” in life so far.

There are some things that I can’t seem to convince myself of, like that I am good at writing. I touched upon this briefly in an entry a couple weeks ago, when a publishing house representative told me I had a talent for writing. Just today a friend of mine read over a report I’m putting together and said “you definately have a flair for writing!”

But it’s not getting through. Every time I read something I’ve written I think “wow this sucks, I can’t write.” I get nervous about my grammar, my spelling, run-on sentences, being coherent, using words like “so” and “anyway” and parenthesis too much.

I think this stems from when I was very young. I was always very good at puzzles, so in Kindergarden teachers thought I would do very well in school, but when I got into first grade I had trouble learning to read and my parents were told that I had dyslexia. This didn’t come as too much of a shock, because both my parents are dyslexic, and they were just happy that I was in a good school that could treat it properly. Until I was in 3rd grade I was in special ed classes, and then they declared that they had done as much as they could for me and let me go back with the rest of my class. I do admit they had done a good job, but I forever did lousy in english. I always thought I sucked at anything related to writing.

So (There I go again! Using “so” all the time! And now parenthesis! Arg!) I’m trying to find ways to overcome this loathing of my own writing. Looking back at some of my journal entries from 2002 has helped, I’ve definately improved since then. But what else can I do to convince myself I don’t suck? And why is my brain being so bad about accepting this?

Michael made a fire downstairs, going to snuggle by it and read for a bit now.

Today Michael took me to The Franklin Institute! I’ve wanted to go since I saw a PBS special about it a few months ago, and since both of us were feeling restless here at home we figured it’d be a good day.

And it was! Even with all the kids running underfoot I had a really nice time. Got to climb through The Giant Heart and see all the rest of cool exhibits. I think my favorite part of the day was visiting the planetarium, I love planetariums and I hadn’t been to one in years. When the actual museum closed we ended up going to see Forces of Nature in the IMAX, and I have to say that I was pretty disappointed, probably because we watch too many documentaries so we were bored with their dumbed down presentation of volcanoes, earthquakes and tornados.

It was a great day %)

*Yawn* I was going to write more but I’m so tired.