William F. Wulf II's blog

QotD: My Journey to Greatness

Greatness is not a destination, but a journey. What do you do for your family, career or community that you’re most proud of?
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I find it highly amusing that this quote appears today, the day I decide to make my reappearance in the bloggosphere properly. Perhaps this is my synchronicity powers working again. I certainly seem to be more in tune with the universe as a whole lately.

What am I most proud of that I do? I understand most fully the implications of living as part of a greater whole, and realize that everybody has within them an ability, a power, a spark of divinity or trace blood of mythic heroes, and because of this they also have the responsibility to live up to the same standards we imagine in our role models, both real and fictional. 

The synchronicity here is that I have only just recently restated my purpose in life: exploring the magic of stories as inspiration for real world heroes and role-models throughout time and space in order to learn the best ways to inspire greatness in those around me, starting with my family and clan, and through them the rest of the world.

My internet swami asked me to...

...Post a link  to http://www.freakangels.com ?  Just to remind people
we're still here  and still pumping out free comics episodes once a week.
Memories get short on  the old intarwubs.

Hell, you could even use

http://seed.sproutbuilder.com/LACofd2ABL8Bmckn

the FREAKANGELS  RSS Window, which auto-updates every Friday.

Thanks.
-W

Curried Meat Pies

Curried Meat Pies
makes 8 pies. Cost: $16

1 lb Ground meat (lamb for me)
3 medium yellow onions, diced
1/2 cup frozen snow peas
1/2 cup turnips, diced
2-3 T  freshly ground Curry powder (I used World Spice Market Capetown Masala)
1 t Sea salt
1 T cooking oil
Cayenne pepper (optional)

2 pkg Pillsbury Pastry dough, thawed

Preheat oven to 425

Saute onions in oil in large skillet until clear, add Curry, half salt, and continue to saute until onions start to brown.

Brown meat separately in medium skillet, stirring constantly to get a fine, even size to the ground meat. Once the meat is hot enough to drain off the fat,  then add meat, and additional salt, to the curry pan and continue to brown. Add turnips and peas and cook until peas are bright green. At this point the meat is cooked and you can taste it to see if more salt or spice needs to be added.

On a lightly floured surface, unfold one pastry shell and cut into halves. Pastry dough may be stretched to desired size or shape, but too thin will not support a full meat filling. If the dough tears, dampen with a drop of water and press together.

Spoon the filling into the halves and fold in any artistic manner you desire. Press dough edges together with a fork and place on lightly greased baking sheet. Bake at 425 for 12 minutes.

http://worldspice.com/home/home.shtml 

New camera

New camera sunset

My father bought me a new digital camera for my birthday. It arrived a day late to go with me out to the Peninsula on Wednesday (a post I have yet to finish), but I did take it out for a spin yesterday on my lunch break. I still need to buy a memory card for it--Sony moved to much smaller MemorySticks since my last camera was made. This is a Sony

W80-front-angled

DSC-W80, a compact black pocket model. Someday I might end up getting an SLR but I feel I have a lot to learn before I bother with the more expensive, fragile models. I

I promise more photos, sunsets, and something from my trip to the beach and Cape Flattery soon.

Prime, again!

Scud - cowboys never quit

This image shamelessly stolen from the comic book, Scud, issue 22. If you're nerd enough to know Scud, then great. If not, well then you should investigate if you need to be that kind of Nerd, because Cowboys Never Quit.

This message brought to you by the number 31. That's how old I am today. Happy Birthday to me!

***Bonus: This week a new Serenity Comic, Better Days #1 by Joss Whedon shipped. Check your local comic stores!

RIP Howard Gobioff 1971 - 2008

It is the duty of the living to honor the memories of those that go before us.

There is a very nice piece on Howard on CMU's alumni site.

An Unplanned Day Should Not Count As Wasted

Screenshot-2

This is my new desktop look. I am proud of it, this cost me 6 hours of my day. An experiment in copying drives destroyed my Ubuntu root installation this morning, before I had eaten or gotten any caffeine. This is my first lesson for the day, it is a very bad time to be using sudo privileges.  I had wanted to migrate off the old, loud, power-hungry SCSI drive onto a sleek, fast and relatively quiet SATA drive, but instead I failed to consider the symbolic links involved. I wasted several hours reading community docs on how to maybe patch the install after critical files were deleted before finally initiating a re-install.
What I did learn: Ubuntu installs pretty easily, but GRUB (a booting program) is very finicky and will try to install on the first IDE device it detects, instead of the root drive selected in the OS install. GRUB will not recognize Ubuntu as a bootable OS on a SATA drive when sitting comfortably on and IDE drive.
Also, I learned to just partition a drive instead of trying to rm the files from it.
With a brand-new install I have found much greater functionality. My previous install had been from a 32-bit disk and involved upgrading to a 64-bit kernel, and in that process I must have missed a lot because gnome themes and desktop effects work much better. I also found a program called Exaile that proposes to work as well as Amarok but in the GTK frontend--the standard for gnome GUI--allowing it to take this beautiful dark skin. Later, I may indulge my vanity and spend an hour looking for a proper wallpaper.

Devil's Advocate

I may not have gotten the chores, shopping and cooking done today that I had planned, but I learned quite a bit about my operating system, and especially learned the dangers of administrating while half-asleep.

RIP Jeff Healey

The Jeff Healey Band - 07 - While My Guitar Gently Weeps

The Jeff Healey Band

RIP Jeff Healey, Blues/Jazz/Rock Guitar God, 1967-2008

FTE Interviews, round 2

I had two more interviews towards Full Time Employment at Zillow.com today. One was with the head of the Windows IT guys, who said mostly fabulous things about me and that he was very Pro-Wulf for hiring me. The second was with my Boss and he just asked me what the others asked and how I answered. There were no technical questions during the process at all.
The next step I believe is to be offered full-time wages and benefits, which will either be good or not.

I should also meet this week with my Comsys representative--this is the company through which I have been contracting since my arrival in the City on the Edge of the Future. If for some wild, unexpected reason the FTE does not work out they will be my next best line on employment.

Breath

Pearl Jam

 

Operator Files: Urban Explorer

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One of the other Operators I work with is into urban exploration, and shared some photos he took on his weekend with me. This is one of them. He found a building in South Lake Union about to be torn down, but covered in amazing graphiti. This is one of the more amazing images--the strange poetry is actually part of the wall art and not added later. There are more images in his flickr account: raytracing.