A Veritable Cornucopia of Useless Information

Anyone who knows me is quite aware that I like spicy things; Buffalo wing sauce is one of the most common condiments that I use. While I can buy any number of wing sauces, it’s more fun to make your own. As best I can tell, this is the original recipe from the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY:

• 4 tablespoons of butter or margarine (margarine appears to be preferred)
• 5 tablespoons of Louisiana-style hot sauce (Frank’s RedHot appears to be preferred)
• 1 tablespoon of white wine vinegar

Melt the butter or margarine over medium heat in a heavy saucepan, add the hot sauce and the 1 tablespoon of vinegar. Stir well and remove from the flame immediately.

Play around with the ratios to suit your own taste. Recipe from Totally Hot! The Ultimate Hot Pepper Cookbook. My own commentary in parentheses.

This is partially for my own reference, but I hope at least one person will enjoy the linkage:

Ron Pattinson writes one of the most content-rich blogs I’ve ever come across — Shut up about Barclay Perkins. (His “main” site is the European Beer Guide.) From browsing his blog (for 2008, he’s averaging more than one multi-paragraph post per day, so actually reading it will take quite some time), you quickly pick up the personality of the guy: as best I can tell, he’s opinionated to the point of being quite abrasive and is thoroughly obsessed with statistics, primary documents, and semantic accuracy. However, what shines though is his ruthless determination to document the history of Europe’s brewing industry and to dismantle what we “know” to be true about beer. It’s really quite a sight to behold.

(No, seriously, go check out his blog. If the technical content is too much for you, scroll until you find a travel/miscellaneous post.)

Hi, I’m back!

To celebrate my triumphant return, I’m subjecting you to an analysis of what lands in my spam folder. Enjoy!

Between April 1 and April 15, I received 367 spam items in my Google Mail account. They break down as follows:

So, in summary, the Internet thinks I’m a straight male (check), I’m middle-aged (nope), and I don’t have insurance (nada). Keep trying guys; you’ll get it right eventually.

…no, not that season (yet, even though the media onslaught will kick into high gear tomorrow), but the season for a new operating system.

It never ceases to amaze me how strongly correlated “I am momentarily beyond earshot of my mobile phone” and “People decide to call said phone” are.

Today’s example: Before noon, I was away from my phone for a total of 12 minutes.  Both incoming calls I received this morning occurred within those 12 minutes.

A quick rundown in the “close to home” department:

• The downtown Taco Bueno opened last week;
•  The Hurricane (which existed for < 3 months as Flashback Dance Club) now serves food during lunch as Pastabilities (which I didn’t realize exists elsewhere in Lincoln);
• Brown Baggers also opened last week (once again, I didn’t realize exists elsewhere in Lincoln);
• A Husker home game-only bar is now (whose name currently escapes me) in the location most recently occupied by The Melting Spot.

On deck – Magnolia Restaurant and Crabby Bill’s Seafood Shack and Tiki Bar

When was walking home for lunch today, I saw a state vehicle with the following license plate number:

12346

I was immediately consumed with thoughts of Druidian air locks and whether the driver also happened to live on 124 Fake St.

This blog’s been napping for far too long.  It’s one thing to be called out by your friends, but to be called out by your mom…well, here we are.

Therefore, I’ll awaken it by passing along a short sleep commentary.  It boggles the mind how different a sleeping experience can be from one day to the next, even when many of the variables (location, total time sleeping, start/end of sleep, activities of the preceding day) are as constant as could be reasonably expected.  I don’t know how one morning I can wake up feeling comfortable and relaxed, then wake up the next morning feeling not rejuvenated at all and with a pain in my back best described as “someone hit me with a baseball bat”.

For the past year, this blog has been using WordPress.  During that time, I’ve upgraded its underlying software…0 times. Now that I’ve learned that anything but the most recent releases of WordPress are hideously insecure; I’ll probably perform an upgrade sometime later on today.

If the blog’s down in the near future, it’ll probably be due to me frakking up the update process.

Hands down, spring is my favorite time of year. However, in recent years, it’s acquired an additional connotation that I am still not quite used to - the bittersweet emotions that result from seeing good friends leave town, either for the summer months or for the long term. In particular, this spring marks the graduation of the last set of college students that I had a large degree of social interaction with (they were freshmen when I was a senior).
Also, this week I’m swapping one roommate for two new ones. Here’s a sampling of trivia about the nine people I’ve lived with since fall 2000 (past, present, and future):

• Two now work for Microsoft
• Two have been to the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals
• Two are now married; one will be married in the next month; three others are also engaged (two to each other)
• One is likely to get his law degree; another is likely to get his Ph.D.