Turkey Frying - Safety First

We're going to fry our turkey again this year. I don't think I'd have ever even considered it until I saw Alton Brown's "Turkey Derrick."

When you consider the turkey frying act, it is fraught with danger. You have a tank of propane about 4 feet away from the culinary equivalent of a rocket engine, atop which you've placed 4-6 gallons of peanut oil which you have heated to about 300° Fahrenheit (150° Celsius for you foreigners), into which you're going to drop 16 pounds of room temperature, damp meat. I don't know about you, but I don't really want to be too close when that happens.

I don't yet have a picture of this year's festivities, but here's a picture from last year.



As you can see, the rope allows you full vertical control of the poultry from a safe distance. And, of course, if you're going to fry a turkey, please keep a fire extinguisher handy. The house you save will likely be your own.

IPv6 and Leopard

After a while of not having it working, I've managed to get IPv6 connectivity back to my house from the office. Huzzah! Now I can work around the broken Juniper VPN that we normally use.

Having got this working again (it's a combination of OpenVPN and the MacOS X port of the tun driver), I've rediscovered that AFP file sharing works over IPv6, like it used to in Tiger. Not only that, but Screen Sharing works over IPv6 too! The only hiccup there is that so far as I can tell, Screen Sharing can't figure out how to connect to IPv6 only DNS names. I've tried flushing the DS cache (with dscacheutil -flushcache), but that doesn't seem to help (nor was it necessary to get AFP by DNS name to work). Connecting to literal IPv6 addresses (wrapped with square brackets), however, does work.

So Big Ups to Apple for their commitment to IPv6! Now they just have to fix that one thing.

Apple has a sense of humor

This is kind of funny. In MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard), convenient file-sharing functionality has been added to the Finder. It will show all the machines on the local network, and if it's an Apple device, it will use a picture of the machine as the icon. However, if it's a Windows machine (or anything else using SMB), you get a picture of a monitor with the BSOD. Ha ha.



It may be a little hard to see in the preview. Click on the picture to see it full size.

I hate donkeys

It's been another ridiculous week for me. Shit like this. By the way, this was the very first hand of the tournament:


Full Tilt Poker Game #_: $10 + $1 Sit & Go (_), Table 1 - 15/30 - No Limit Hold'em - 19:05:26 ET - 2007/11/17
Seat 1 posts the small blind of 15
Seat 2 posts the big blind of 30
The button is in seat #6
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to hero [Ad Ah]
Seat 3 calls 30
Seat 4 calls 30
villain raises to 165
nsayer raises to 450
Seat 5 folds
Seat 6 folds
Seat 1 folds
Seat 2 folds
villain calls 285
*** FLOP *** [9c 5d Qd]
villain bets 1,050, and is all in
hero calls 1,050, and is all in
villain shows [Kh Td]

Stupid donkey.

hero shows [Ad Ah]
*** TURN *** [9c 5d Qd] [Jh]

And I get fucked again.

*** RIVER *** [9c 5d Qd Jh] [Jd]
villain shows a straight, King high
hero shows two pair, Aces and Jacks
villain wins the pot (3,105) with a straight, King high
hero stands up
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 3,105 | Rake 0
Board: [9c 5d Qd Jh Jd]
Seat 1: (small blind) folded before the Flop
Seat 2: (big blind) folded before the Flop
Seat 3: folded before the Flop
Seat 4: folded before the Flop
Seat 5: villain showed [Kh Td] and won (3,105) with a straight, King high
Seat 6: hero (button) showed [Ad Ah] and lost with two pair, Aces and Jacks

Wii would like to play

We bought a Wii last night. The concept of position and motion sensitive controls is truly revolutionary. Nothing that has come before has been as immersive. Our Wii came with the Wii Sports title, which includes Tennis, Baseball, Golf, Bowling and Boxing.

The baseball game is sort of one dimensional and boring. All you do is pitch and bat. It's a lot more like Over The Line than Baseball. I don't like it so much. Tennis is a bit more challenging. Tennis is played as doubles, and in addition to swinging the controller at the right time, you need to pick whether to swing forehand or backhand correctly depending on where the ball is. Golf is kind of fun. You can't swing too hard or it will just accentuate any hook or slice you've imparted on the ball, so controlling your swing is what it's all about. Boxing is played with the numchuck, which is a second controller wired to the first one (the primary controllers are wireless). The numchuck also has a position sensor in it, so with the controller in one hand and the numchuck in the other, you throw your fists around like real boxing.

But the pièce de résistance is Bowling. You swing the controller just like it was a bowling ball, and let go of the trigger button to let go of the ball. The english you put on your swing gets imparted to the ball. It has to be the single most accurate sporting simulation since the treadmill.

Scarlet and I really got some exercise last night. We bought a Wii because we decided to see if it really was true that you could get into playing the games as an exercise program. Well, the hype is true. I think this is going to be very good for us.

The only issue now is that I'm not sure what other games we'll want to buy. I'm sure we'll get tired of Bowling some day, but I can't really see that day from here.

Football sucks around here

I would really, really enjoy watching football on TV if it weren't for the fact that we live in the San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose TV market.

The problem comes about because of the NFL blackout rules. The rules say that if the 49ers or Raiders play a road game or a sold-out home game, no other local station may air a competing game. That means that we never see a game that doesn't involve the Raiders or 49ers except for the Sunday and Monday night games and weeks where either team has a bye week.

And if you haven't been paying attention, this is not the same 49er team that was helmed by Joe Bill Walsh [ed: how'd I get that wrong?!] back in the day. And I'm not sure the Raiders have ever been worth watching. The most memorable Raiders moment I can recall was seeing a fan with a paper bag over his head with the words PSL HOLDER written on it.

It's almost worth signing up for the DirecTV NFL package, but that's $180 a year. I don't like football quite that much.

Maybe if we're lucky folks will realize just how bad the 49ers and Raiders suck and they'll stop selling out their home games. Then we'd at least have a 50:50 chance of a choice.

We can but hope.