Q Commentary

I’m gonna rant for a bit here, first about the government bailing out people who caused a financial crisis with the people who it hurts money.  Then less of a rant and more of a commentary on the vice presidential candidate debate.  So first the rant:

So the Senate managed to pass their 700 Billion dollar bail out bill on Wednesday and I know there are a lot of people that say it needs to be done, but honestly I don’t see it as a good thing.  Yeah I realize that there is a credit crisis and everyone is having trouble getting loans because the banks are wary about lending money and not getting it back, at least that’s the story I keep hearing.

So the government needs to step in and bail them out by buying their bad debts so then they will have money to lend out again is the basic concept I get from this idea.  Correct me if I’m wrong but if their going to inject 700 BILLION dollars into the economy I think it’d be better to give it directly to the people who need it and small businesses.  Big business is what got us into this mess, why not give small businesses the chance to bail us out rather than big business and Wall Street.  I mean it seems to me that if that money went to people like homeowners and small businesses then most people would actually be able to pay, if not pay off that mortgage that their not paying now which is the reason the banks are in trouble in the first place.  Small businesses are in trouble because they can’t get credit in order to purchase product or expand operations, which is where other businesses get their money (guess we could call it the circle of business) which gets put into other businesses and used to pay employees.  With an infusion of that 700 Billion maybe businesses wouldn’t need to borrow as much.  Of course this will never happen the government is going give the money to the people who put us in this situation in the first place rather than the people who it affects and just hope that it will get better for them.

All right next up, the vice presidential debate tonight.  I haven’t watched a whole lot of debates, but overall I thought this one was pretty good, although I don’t think there was a real winner of the debate.  Now personally I don’t like Sarah Palin, I disagree with most of her opinions and think she is seriously underqualified to be one step away from running the country.  I think she also managed to not answer most of the questions she was asked and danced around the others by not actually telling anyone what her and McCain’s plans are but rather just saying how they were better than Obama and Biden’s.  I will give her that she had some good rebuttals, but they all seemed rehursed.  One part in particular caught my attention when the candidates were told what people typically thought their “achilies heal” Palin, rather than answering the question of wheather or not she thought it was acurate that her inexpierence was and acurate statement she compleatly avoided the question and instead of saying anything about her flaws only said how great she’d be for Vice President, again not really stating any examples.

Joe Biden on the other hand I thought answered the questions almost imediatley, stated reasons for his answers and thought much faster on his feet from what I could tell.  The one flaw I took away was that he did appear to bash McCain almost more than he talked up himself and Obama.  His answers were extreamly good and he was passonate about his answers but I feel like the fact that he needed to state why McCain was wrong simply to counter the fact that Palin kept saying how great he was without actually saying how or why tainted some of his answers.  A good debate none the less and I hope that more good debates follow.

So I figured out how to turn on a feature in OS X that I think should have been enabled by default but is not. This is the ability to use Tab to move between buttons in a dialog box, such as an OK or Cancel button. If you tend to use a Keyboard instead of a mouse, I know I do on my laptop, you’ll probably have found out that you can’t simply tab between options when a dialog box pops up in OS X…….until now that is!

Start by opening the System Preferences and choosing the “Keyboard and Mouse” section. Once their switch over to the “Keyboard Shortcuts” Tab.  Down at the bottom you’ll see two option bullets for Full Keyboard Access. By default the “Text Boxes and lists only” option is selected. Switch it to “All Controls”. That’s it! Now when a dialog box open up you’ll be able to use Tab to switch between the available options.

One last thing to keep in mind is that once you’ve tabbed to your choice you need to hit the “Space Bar” not the “Return Key”.  This frustrated me to no end till I figured it out as hitting “Return” will simply select the choice that is highlighted to begin with.  Enjoy!

I thought I’d throw a quick Mac tip up for today that some people might not know but can be very useful.  I decided to do this since I woke up to a voicemail on my phone from a guy I’ve done some work for upgrading his eMac.  His computer had frozen up after putting a CD in and on restarting it continued to freeze.  As those of you with Mac’s know several years ago Apple stopped putting eject buttons on the actual CD drives in their computers, instead they have an Eject button on the keyboard.  Now this is very fancy and nice, but it does cause a problem if a CD is the cause of a computer freeze and you can’t just press a button to eject it.

Luckily there is a solution!  If you happen to have trouble with your Mac and you think a CD in the drive is to blame you can eject it without the button on the keyboard.  Just hold down the Left Mouse button (or your only mouse button for anyone using a one button mouse) while the computer starts up.  This is a hardwired command in the Mac that will eject the CD drive.  That way you can get the CD out of the drive and hopefully get you Mac up and running.

You know what’s a great meal, and fun to make? Sushi! It sounds daunting, but actually isn’t that bad. A lot of the credit has to go to my wife Sherry, she makes the rice, I just handled the rolls. People don’t realize that you can put basically anything you want in Sushi, not just fish, although that is really good!

So, how does one make sushi?

Well you’ll need some supplies:
- 1 Cup of Long Grain Rice - Will make about 5 rolls
- Aprox 3 Tablespoons Sushi Rice Vinegar
- Seaweed Sheets (Nori) - You should be able to find it in the grocery store.
- Bamboo Sushi Mat
- Fillings - In our case we used Marinated Flank Steak, Crab, Cucumber, Cheese and Avocado (see anything you want
- A Sharp Knife

Start by cooking your rice, since not everyone has a Hello Kitty microwaveable rice cooker (I said my wife does the rice cooking) just follow whatever method you know to cook your rice.
Once you’ve got it cooked and it’s still warm stir in the the Sushi Rice Vinegar then let it sit for a few minutes to cool to a point where you can handle it but it’s still warm. The rice is easier to work with while it’s still warm.

Now, take a sheet of seaweed and put it with the rough side up on the sushi mat. Spread a layer of rice onto the seaweed leaving about an inch uncovered at the end farthest from you. Then add your filling in a strip along the bottom. When your done it should look something like this: Now your ready to roll your sushi!

I start by dipping my finger in water and wetting the far end of the seaweed, that way the roll seals itself better when I’m done. When I’m ready to roll I put my fingers just in front of my filling and use my thumbs and the mat to start rolling. Just use the mat to help you roll, it does a good job of keeping things even as you go. Once you get to the end the seaweed will stick to itself and you’ll have a sushi roll. A trick I learned for cutting the roll down is too cut it in half the work your way toward the ends, starting with cutting towards the end I tend to squish my rolls.

And there you have it! You’ve made your own sushi!

I played 9 holes of Disc Golf after work today, it was a great way to relax after a mind numbing day at work.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to throw more backhand since there are certain shots I’d really like to have a good backhand throw on and I found I’ve got a great disc for it. My Discraft Elite Z XL Driver has been in my bag for a while, but throwing forehand it’s always been unpredictable. It’s 1.5 overstable to the left so throwing forehand it doesn’t always come back right. The last time I went out I tried throwing it backhand once or twice and it flew great! I had some of my best throws ever on the holes I used it on today, that is unless I hit a tree . But man I found out the best way to throw this disc curves perfectly for backhand. I just need to level it out more when I throw to get the most distance out of it. If you throw backhand I’d think this would be a great disc.

I ran into an odd error the other day and since I didn’t find an exact answer online before, I figured I’d post the answer I came up with in case anyone else has run into the same situation.

My iPod touch is the 16 GB model, 1.1.4 software and is Jailbroken. The other day ripped a DVD I wanted to put on my iPod (I do own it) encoded it using the same software I’ve used on at least 10 other movies and copied it into iTunes to change the meta tags before copying it to the iPod. The movie played fine in iTunes but when I dragged it to the iPod I get the message:

“Movie” was not copied to the iPod “My iPod” because it cannot be played on this iPod.

Now this really confused me because it was an MP4 file encoded using the same codex and settings that several other movies on my iPod used and they copied and played just fine.

After checking the info on the movie in question and on the ones that worked I found that the only difference between them was the video resolution. Most of the Movies that I had encoded before were at around 600×320 resolution, the new movie I’d encoded at 720×480. So I popped over to Apple’s website, checked out the Tech Specs for the iPod Touch and what do you know, it has a Max Video Resolution of 640×480. Once I encoded the video at a lower resolution it copied to the iPod Touch just fine.

So in the end I solved the problem and found out that the iPod Touch will not simply downscale a higher res video than will display on the screen. It would have been nice however if iTunes would have just told me the exact reason that the video could not be copied to the iPod so I did not have to go searching for a specific solution to a general error message. Well hope this helps someone else out.

I had my best game of Disc Golf ever on the Woodland Disc Golf Course at Pinetop, I finished at par for the first time ever! Jason, Fred, Stuart and Joel made it out and it was a beautiful day. The wind was kicking up a bit when we started but overall it didn’t effect too many putts. It was harder to get drives into the air, the wind seemed to be pushing them down. I did manage to get four birdied this game though, I think that might be the most birds I’ve had in one game. I birdied 3, 4, 7 and 16. The bird on 16 was the bird of the game though!
A high putt angled hard came down at just the right angle and stuck right in the basket. After a great game this was a hell of a shot to make near the end. I was one under after this bird, but I boggied hole 17.

I’m sitting on the couch last night and I happen to look out into the back yard and notice something weird. “That’s odd” I say to myself “the ground almost looks white? Wait a minuet, the top of the grill is white too….Is that SNOW??” In fact it was snow, a thin layer of snow covering the back yard and the trees. I couldn’t believe it. I mean what the hell? Isn’t it April? I thought we were done with this cold snowy weather. I mean here I am thinking, “I should really right a post about how nice it was to grill some brauts last weekend, it was so nice and warm and there’s nothing better than cooking food outside over a fire.” and here it is snowing. I had to scrape snow off my windshield this morning, and that is just not right for April, not right at all.

I just wanted to put up a quick post to pimp the Disc Golf Association of America (DGAOA). Their site DGAOA.com just launched, and since I’m a contributor why wouldn’t I want to push it as much as possible. The association itself is open to anyone, as of now there’s a group of four of us, here in the White Mountains, who try to get out and play at least once a week. Check out the site for info on the courses we play, tips and your everyday players thoughts on their recent game.

Let me tell you, nothing will make you and your friends feel more like big shots than sitting around a poker table drinking some good scotchand smoking a good cigar. Myself and a few friends had theopportunity to do this last week for Greg’s birthday. A few Monte Cristo cigars and a bottle of Dalwhinnie scotch make for a good time, even if your friends take all your money.
What a great time though, sitting around with friends, BSing, playing poker. Let’s hope for more times like that in the near future!