Year: 2022 Page 1 of 7

Today I wanted to go on an adventure.

On December 29, 2022

“In the Garden
Sit Quietly in My Presence”
RND 3-28-1945 to 3-3-2018

Today’s adventure needed to happen. I needed to get out of the house. I needed to not be inside anymore. I needed to go do something out in the world and be among trees and be among birds, and just be among something different than the four walls inside of my house.

I started looking at thrift stores. I thought maybe I wanted to go have an adventure that was a treasure hunt to see what unknown and untold trinkets and treasures and items I might stumble across in my wandering’s, but as I looked around, I realize it was just another building another set of four walls. Another place the felt like my house filled and cluttered with things things I knew things I didn’t because I never would at the end. It was just more stuff.

So instead of going and standing among other things and other peoples things from other people, I decided to do what I often do and think about what I wanted to eat.

So I went to our favorite little sandwich shop and got a Susie’s special and then as I was sitting with it there in the car alongside the root beer because there’s something about adventure in repair that just go together in my heart, I remembered we have a fantastic garden near us.

You can just go for free. It’s part of our county park system. It’s something that my taxes help support and it’s just a free resource I could just go to. I can be outside among the birds in the trees and whatever plant life there is this time of year. Or just sit there and eat my sandwich and look out over the little lake so that’s exactly what I did.

I drove to Brookside Gardens and I sat in my car and I ate my sandwich, and I watched the gaggle of geese that were being fed by one of the other patrons. There were a couple of ducks and turtles that were also out, trying to sun themselves in a little bit of winter sunshine that was coming down through the cloudless sky.

I ate my sandwich and I drink my root beer and I grabbed my camera, because the proper adventure can happen in real life or can happen through a lens, because you never know what secret there are.

I saw a beautiful bird among the marsh grasses took a number of pictures of it don’t know what it is. I’ll have to get back home in consult the buckle birds to try to figure out who it was. I saw when I walked further on Pastor geese and ducks and turtles, saw some cardinals fall from chickadees and finches and then I saw a big bird.

It soared from somewhere in the distance and landed on a tree branch where your pie, but just across from the path from where I was standing. I slowly got my camera out slowly crept towards it. I did not want to disturb this magnificent beast but you can never be too careful, so slowly walked up to below, and tried to angle around to get a decent a photo for this beautiful hawk wasn’t completely obscured by all the brown brown branches it was standing in a few photos will see if they turn out to be anything in the few moments before his giant wings open. He just took one powerful flap of those wings and soared off into the distance. Out of sight.

This post was written by speaking softly into my air pods sitting on this bench at the park.

21 Flavors of Mountain Dew

By Carl

On November 27, 2022

In Links and Quotes

I Tried 21 Flavors of Mountain Dew For Some Reason.

I read this article partially to see how many of them I had consumed. There is a surprising number of them now. I laughed so hard throughout this article. It was a treat to read.

These are my favorite parts that hit me as the funniest.

Voltage (blue raspberry plus ginseng) – There is no such thing as a blue raspberry. The idea of making raspberry flavors blue started in 1958 as a way of differentiating it from other red flavors. None of this matters, because voltage doesn’t taste like raspberries. It does, however, taste blue. Like a melted rocket pop. My husband noted it had a faint amaro flavor, because he is lying to himself.

…

Major Melon (watermelon) – In the swirling abyss of garbage drinks, we found rock bottom. It tasted like liquified watermelon Bubble Yum. The mascot is a watermelon that does war crimes.

…

Overdrive (citrus punch) – Look, does it even matter what I say here? Do you actually care what Overdrive tastes like? No. It tastes like every single other Mtn Dew, and it tastes like nothing.

…

Thrashed Apple (green apple) – The flavor of this drink is fleeting and crisp, like a fall day. At least, I thought it was, until everyone else at the table told me I had Mtn Dew-induced scurvy. It tasted like carbonated apple cider. This was the clear winner for me, and by winner, I mean “It doesn’t make me want to cry.”

…

Explaining why I embarked on a quest to consume as many different flavors of Mountain Dew as possible is not an easy task.

…

As my husband put it, “It’s like someone made the diet in Diet Coke into a drink.” I eventually found the regular variant of Spark, which tasted like a wet pixie stick

…

Code Red (cherry) – Have you ever eaten a maraschino cherry and thought, “I want to drink the syrup that this was floating in”? Of course you haven’t. You’re not a toddler.

…

LiveWire (orange) – Am I losing my mind? Is LiveWire not that sweet? (No, it has 1.5 times the amount of sugar an adult human should consume in a day.) Is my body merely growing accustomed to the Dew, the way we do to heat, to pain, to the loneliness of existence?

…

They are almost all equally bad, and half of them are the same drink. It is an egalitarian system of suckiness, wherein even the best variant of Mtn Dew is still just Mtn Dew. Also, “Mtn” isn’t even how you abbreviate the word “mountain.”

…

What followed was a journey deep into beverage purgatory, a strange sort of limbo where things taste like nothing but sugar, occasionally like bubble gum, and invariably like defeat. The focus groups for these products consisted of a cardboard cut out of Randy “Macho-Man” Savage and a beer koozie that says “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Titties”.

…

Baja Blast (tropical lime) – Have you ever wanted to taste something the same color as Windex, but allegedly less likely to make you go blind? This tastes like bland fruit punch and is somehow vaguely vegetal.

…

Legend (blackberry citrus) – Buffalo Wild Wings exclusive. It is a strange thing to find yourself in a Buffalo Wild Wings for the first time, and the reason you are there is for Mtn Dew, something which you do not actually enjoy. It causes you to take stock of your life as you stare into the inky depths of this drink. Others described the taste as “a melted popsicle”, “a less sweet Blue Gatorade”, and “a depressed grape.” It tastes like Berry Bash, and Purple Thunder. Either it’s having an existential crisis, or I am.

…

White Out (citrus) – This is apparently the white whale of all Mtn Dew flavors, nearly impossible to find, and another item that I got from a stranger online (sorry, Mom!). I could no longer tell you what I was tasting, perhaps in part because I’d decided to use flaming hot Cheetos as a palette cleanser between sips. (My body is a decaying temple.) Everyone else said that this iteration of Mtn Dew was inoffensive, and not unlike Squirt, though with less of a overt grapefruit taste. I don’t know. Honestly, does it matter? Does anything matter?

…

Baja Flash (pineapple coconut) – Discontinued. In every project, there is a point where things get so bad, they become a truly spectacular kind of awful, and that is what Baja Flash is. It smells like sunscreen, like the liquid hedonism of spring break. There is something illicit about drinking it, like eating an entire tube of Chapstick. “This is rad,” I whisper, cackling, as I take another sip.

Deciding to read it later, or not

By Carl

On November 26, 2022

In Links and Quotes

Whenever I see something online that I think I want to read, I put it in Instapaper — and then I try to leave it for a while. Often when I visit Instapaper the chief thing I do is delete the pieces I only had thought I needed to read. So for me it’s not just a read-later service, it’s a don’t-read-later service. But that only works if I don’t go there too often. I try to catch up with my Instapaper queue once a week at most.
this and that – Snakes and Ladders

This is the reading version of grabbing an item at a store and carrying it around while I shop. If I look at the item when I am ready to check out, I buy it. More often, by the time I’m ready to check out, whatever impulse that overcame me to grab the item is gone. So it stays at the store.

Woodpeckers: The Hole Story

By Carl

On November 22, 2022

In Movies & TV

About

Do you love woodpeckers? Have you grown an intense interest in birding in the past few years? Then you’ll enjoy this documentary from PBS.

Paul Giamatti tells you about all the different kinds of woodpeckers in the world and how they live and thrive in various environment. I was able to put in my local PBS station and watch the entire thing. It’s worth your time if you enjoy watching birds.

We have little downy woodpeckers that are so fluffy and sweet. We also have large red-bellied woodpeckers and every so often a northern flicker comes to visit.

You may have seen Janet Jackson can crash your laptop, but has it ever played classical music at random?

By Carl

On August 30, 2022

In Tech Tinkering

In trying to help a friend with computer troubles remotely, I jokingly asked if he was playing Janet Jackson albums near his laptop. He thought I was joking but no. Computers and requencies are weird. Rhythm Nation has the power to crash computers (with spinning hard drives.)

It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.
The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.
Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers – The Old New Thing

Careful playing near old hard drives.

This reminded me of the time in college I had a roommate who’s computer would play classical music at random. One of the weirdest things I’ve ever encountered in my years of computing.

I had to look for an archived version of this support article because it last affected Windows 2000. (Which was like, 7 years ago, right?)

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer’s BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.
Microsoft KB Archive/261186 – BetaArchive Wiki

Credit to fuzzynyanko on reddit for linking to a video of this in action.