Chili shepherd’s pie

Posted on 2009-01-05 by frank

Over the holidays I had the opportunity to see some daytime television shows. Rachel Ray’s show is engaging, and both Andrea and I saw her make a Chili Shepherd’s Pie, but my Web Search Fu apparently isn’t as strong as it used to be, ’cause I can’t find it. I did find one that looks good, and it’s nice to have recipes, but using leftovers really gets to the point of Shepherd’s Pie. So next time we make some chili, instead of making nachos with the leftovers we’ll put it it in a baking dish, slather some mashed potatos and cheese on the top, and bake it. Yum!

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It’s tough to use a computer with no display

Posted on 2008-12-18 by frank

The screen on my work computer, a Macbook Pro, has died for a 2nd time. The first time, I sent it to Apple as we had no local Apple Authorized Service Center, and they returned it to me with my high-quality third party RAM in a bag, along with a message that the screen problems were caused by RAM that didn’t meet Apple specifications. Um, bullshit, but my computer worked again so I didn’t care too much. I put the 4GB RAM back in and had been using it trouble-free since early September.

Now the screen’s dead again, I’ve swapped the factory RAM back in so I don’t have to put up with crap stories from the service center about how the RAM is causing the video card to take a vacation, and today I’ll take it to our new Peachmac so they can fix it. Everyone I know has been happy with their service so far, so I’m pretty sure they’ll just replace the logic board and send me on my way — after all, this is a known problem.

In the meantime, I jumped through some hoops to enable Screen Sharing via the command line. Chris Brewer’s instructions were the most thorough, but after following them I had to try a couple of different VNC clients before I found one, TightVNC, that worked from my Vista test machine.

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Please, no more electrically-propelled kids toys

Posted on 2008-11-25 by frank

I hope my kids never have any of those things. Every time I see an electric scooter go by, especially if it’s ridden by a kid who could obviously use some exercise, I can’t help think, ”I could totally smoke that thing on my bicycle”.

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Spicy brownies

Posted on 2008-11-25 by frank

Spicy brownies sound pretty good to me. I’ve tried spicy chocolate concoctions before, so I’ve added these ingredients to our Trader Joe’s shopping list.

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Paint recycling

Posted on 2008-05-31 by frank

Apparently the best we can hope for paint recycling in Columbia County is the once a year recycling event. When we moved here in 2001, the county commission had commissioned a study about building a recycling center. Where’s my recycling center?? argh.

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