Adam's Blog

Tonight was my first shot at making "Country Fried Steak." Normally, I can just kind of imagine a recipe and it comes out good enough, but this one slipped, I admit. So here's my advice if you choose to go for it with Country Fried Steak: 1. Use Cube Steak. If you decide to go with round, use meat tenderizer and give it plenty of time to sit. I used round and tenderized it with a mallet and it was still really tough. It needs to be very soft to almost crumble apart. 2. You will need to coat it in either buttermilk or an egg wash, but if you do use buttermilk, let it sit in the buttermilk for some time. The crust was too weak and broke apart, sadly, while still in the oil. 3. Think about gravy BEFORE making the steak. It's not too hard to put together either a white or brown gravy, but it's very hard to it after the steak is ready... at least, if you want to serve it while the food is still warm. Overall, I'd rate this a 6/10. It was good enough overall, but it was bad chicken fried steak....

Yesterday, I began building my new work laptop. It's a Dell XPS M1530, a nice 15" widescreen screamer with a dual core Centrino, 2GB RAM, a 256MB video card, embedded Bluetooth, 802.11n, and, for the first time in my company, Windows Vista. It's typical for me to buy/install new software for testing on my own machine. I can generally test most software and evaluate it pretty tough, so it seemed with the XP consumer drop-dead date fast approaching, I ought to have better than cursory familiarity with Vista. It's also a good time to ensure that all of our critical tools run on what will, unfortunately, likely be a platform our IT guys run shortly. So I embarked on the Vista adventure. The verdict? Well, let's start at the beginning? You know how every review of Vista... like ever... has complained about UAC? Well, imagine that level of annoying times 10 and you can begin to understand UAC. The most pointless utility ever not only bugs you for virtually everything - including deleting shortcuts from the desktop - but also moves all over the screen so it's impossible to predict where it will show up next. Also, sometimes it sits...

This week, I had to make a trip to the Apple store. My iPhone began growing some "bubbles" under the screen, so they swapped one out. I had also brought back a flaky Airport Extreme, but since I only made an appt for my iPhone, they told me I'd have to make another appointment for my Airport with the "Mac" team. Frustrated, I spoke to the store manager and got in via "standby" appointment. They didn't have an AE in house, so I had to order one and go back this weekend. The people at the Apple store were nice, but the entire thing was a cluster. The Apple Store is always so crowded and chaotic and it's hard to find someone to help you. Luckily, it turned out ok, and I got a new iPhone and a new Airport. I wanted to post, but then I remembered what happened in the past when I posted about Apple. I wrote a piece for OSNews some time ago called "A Month With a Mac." If you read it, it's not really very negative - in fact, it's mostly positive - but I eventually decided to stick with PC, predicting, accurately, I'd...

This is why I am now supporting Obama. While every other knucklehead in the race rattles off more of the same status quo crap, one man can deliver something that sounds logical, not like rehearsed, poll-tested spitback. As someone who considers himself spiritual, but attaches no organized religion to his beliefs, I like reading this, especially when an increasing alternative is Mike Huckabee, who is the only candidate who actually makes another 4 years of Bush seem appetizing. "For one, they need to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice. Folks tend to forget that during our founding, it wasn't the atheists or the civil libertarians who were the most effective champions of the First Amendment. It was the persecuted minorities, it was Baptists like John Leland who didn't want the established churches to impose their views on folks who were getting happy out in the fields and teaching the scripture to slaves. It was the forbearers of the evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they did not want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability...

I bricked my iPhone attempting to upgrade from 1.1.2 to 1.1.3. Last night I tried iJailbreak Mobile twice, but I mysteriously dropped off my wifi at 93% and then 94%, and that wiped me out. So I used iJailbreak, but it requires the "Soft Upgrade" package from the Installer repo, which has since been removed, which left me with 300+ megabytes of trash littered all over my iPhone. So I ran the "Official 1.1.3 Installer" and it worked! But then it rebooted and gave me the dreaded "Your phone is damaged, please bring it back to Apple" nonsense. Luckily, you can put your iPhone into restore mode - aka "dfu" mode - by holding down the home key and plugging it into your computer. I restored to 1.1.2, and then upgraded to 1.1.3. So I am on 1.1.3, and thankfully, my phone works, so that's good. But I'm no longer jailbroken, and that really sucks. Here's hoping the SDK is not as lame as some fear it might be.

"Don't screw around with the Windows registry." That's something I've told both users, helpdesk techs, and even IT managers for nearly a decade. "If you change something in the registry you don't understand, you can render your system unbootable." And yet, over the last 10 years, I've had my fingers pretty deep in the registry several times - especially with my high capacity terminal servers. But it wasn't until this week that I really had my first stumble, and it was quite an adventure. Read on for the exciting adventure in gory detail. <!--more-->It all started with an attractive promise made by the folks at <a href="http://www.kaxaml.com/">Kaxaml, a lightweight XAML-optimized text editor</a>. It seemed like a cool app, and I like to dip my toes into new types of programming from time to time to see if anything sticks. After all, mere exposure to a myriad of new technologies puts you at the head of the pack in the IT world. Honestly, most people don't even know what <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xaml">XAML</a> is. So I downloaded the MSI for Kaxaml, which requires the .NET framework version 3.0 or greater. WinFX, or .NET 3.0, is relatively new, and for most people, there's little...

So, my wife just sent me a text message with a picture of my baby. Unfortunately, Apple and AT&T still make us use the incredibly stupid "viewmymessage.com" to see our MMS messages. They text you a URL, a username, and a password, but not a link, for reasons I can't understand. So, as I attempt to fetch my MMS, this is what I get. Click image for larger version #$!@* YOU APPLE!! Add MMS to the iPhone already!!

Once again, I am dealing with trackback spam, aka referrer spam. Since sethadam1.com records the pages that refer hits to us, I've had to deal with jerks who issue HTTP requests so that they get a link back. Too bad they don't realize that every referrer gets a rel="nofollow" attribute (more here). So, I had to issue these SQL statements to the database today:

DELETE FROM user_agent_table
WHERE (referrer like 'http://mp3%' OR referrer LIKE '%mp3.com%')

DELETE FROM user_agent_table
WHERE referrer LIKE '%musicforum.org%'

Musicforum.org has some asshole posting all sorts of links that pass a GET variable with a sethadam1.com URL in it, which appears to do nothing other than ping the page. So, effective immediately, we run a regex validator on referrers and will be doing a more frequent clean up. Hear that spammers? Take your crap elsewhere.

I ditched Bloglines the other day for Google Reader. I'm not a huge fan of Bloglines' new beta interface, most because I find it clunkier than the current interface. Sure, the current one feels a little dated, but it works. Plus, the iPhone interface is nice. Google has a lot going for it. For one, it seems everyone who uses it raves about it. Also, the iPhone interface is integrated with all the other Google services I use, Picasa Web, Gmail, etc. This all came about because I wanted to use a desktop RSS reader at home and sync it with my web interface for work and iPhone, but that doesn't exist unless I use Newsgator. Bloglines and Google both appear to have a sync API, but neither Vienna nor NetNewsWire (nor any other client I could find) actually syncs back to them. But it appears Vienna is working on one for Google's reader, and with the Bloglines beta looming, it seemed like a good enough time to make the jump. So I did. Google's Reader is awfully attractive, but it's really keyboard driven. Not only that, but there's no way to have it mark all items as read as...

I just hit "party shuffle" on my iTunes and this is what came up on the list. It was a great run, I really like all of these songs. Immortality - Pearl Jam Sandwiches Time - Weezer Serve the Servants - Nirvana Explode and Make Up - Sugar For Me This Is Heaven - Jimmy Eat World Out of Time - Blur Spacesuit - Shift Porch - Pearl Jam Zombie Eaters - Faith No More Listen to the Music - The Doobie Brothers The Tain - The Decemberists Anna Begins - Counting Crows Caught Somewhere in Time - Iron Maiden Dear God - XTC Cryptical Envelopment - The Grateful Dead Notice anything funny? Only three of the songs in the list are from the last decade. Needless to say, I'm feeling a little old today.