Month: November 2015

Correct Bedding for a Turkey

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So I’ve tried different things over time to roast the Thanksgiving turkey. Cut celery, carrot into logs, layer onion and garlic.

But I saw a Food Wishes video on classic turkey preparation.

It called for roasting the bird over this, only I use a lot more of the stuff. I like the vegetable broth it produces.
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This expresses the most flavor from the carrot, celery and garlic. Also threw a bit of parsley and thyme in the mix too. Plus the turkey neck and giblets.

And the herb butter, i use a whole stick and a couple packs of herbs. Creates a really fragrant turkey when it’s roasting. Plus it make the skin nice and brown and crispy.

That’s how you use ALL of the turkey or at least what’s in the package.

The bird itself was 15lbs. And having done a turkey like this on Thursday I can say this will be phenomenal.

 

Twice this week the MBTA Commuter to Providence was late coming in this week

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So on Monday the MBTA Commuter from South Station in Boston, MA to Providence Station in Providence, RI took two hours to make the trip because of a broken down train. Now the normal trip is an hour and ten minutes. So I can sort of understand that one even if I was majorly pissed.

But today, I board the 3:30PM train out of South Station. It’s suppose to make Providence by 4:45PM. It got in a half hour late.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact the train was super packed. I’ve never seen a 3:30PM train this packed.

In fact let’s not get started about RIPTA. I get to the bus stop this evening and the next bus isn’t for another 20 minutes. This btw is prime time for RIPTA. What the ever loving fuck? I decided I’d take the 15-20 minute walk home. Didn’t see ONE outbound bus on my route. Saw THREE inbounds though.

It’s all got me considering being a profligate polluter and buying a car and saying to fuck with the MBTA and RIPTA. I can pickup a new VW Jetta for $13,500 or so. I may as well save up the dough and buy it cash. I’ll tolerate the MBTA and RIPTA’s cluster fucks for a little while longer.

31 Questions for Atheists and My Answers

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So these were posted here. It’s the Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry. So you can pretty clearly see they’re all loaded questions.

  • How would you define atheism?

    Atheism is simply my non-belief in a supreme being or god.

  • Do you act according to what you believe (there is no God) in or what you don’t believe in (lack belief in God)?

    I act on what I have determined through trial and error to be best for me and for the society I live in.

  • Do you think it is inconsistent for someone who “lacks belief” in God to work against God’s existence by attempting to show that God doesn’t exist?

    This one is fairly nonsensical – no it is not inconsistent. It is my duty to educate and if it means helping to challenge others faith in a non-existent god then so be it.

  • How sure are you that your atheism properly represents reality?

    It’s simple – there have been many gods before the current versions. And they all fell by the wayside. So it’s as real as it gets.

  • How sure are you that your atheism is correct?

    See answer above.

  • How would you define what truth is?

    What is truth said pontius pilate. Truth is a logical thing.

  • Why do you believe your atheism is a justifiable position to hold?

    Because there is now a plethora of research that Determines the Christian faith is based on only so much bovine effluent.

  • Are you a materialist or a physicalist or what?

    Materialist to a very great degree.

  • Do you affirm or deny that atheism is a worldview? Why or why not?

    It’s not a world view, or even a faith. It’s a non belief.

  • Not all atheists are antagonistic to Christianity but for those of you who are, why the antagonism?

    I don’t call it antagonism – I just want to educate people and get them to see the damage caused by their faith in a non-existent god.

  • If you were at one time a believer in the Christian God, what caused you to deny His existence?

    Twelve years of Catholic schools. And in one of those years we studied the Bible. That pretty much tore it for me.

  • Do you believe the world would be better off without religion?

    Yes in fact I do believe that. We’d have not had such bloody wars in the name of God, Allah, et al.

  • Do you believe the world would be better off without Christianity?

    No – I want all faiths to suffer the death by a thousand paper cuts.

  • Do you believe that faith in a God or gods is a mental disorder?

    No – not a mental disorder per se. More a weak mind.

  • Must God be known through the scientific method?

    By using the term ‘scientific method’ it shows that the author of these questions has no idea what said method is. So the answer is a pretty clear No to that one.

  • If you answered yes to the previous question, then how do you avoid a category mistake by requiring material evidence for an immaterial God?

    The thing is – there is no evidence for said God or Jesus or any of it. I mean come on, you can tell this was written by Christian Apologetics.

  • Do we have any purpose as human beings?

    Well there’s the drive to reproduce which we’ve been pretty successful at. Except for people like me – who will never reproduce.

  • If we do have purpose, can you as an atheist please explain how that purpose is determined?

    Quite simple – you’re educated and one day you too will find your special purpose, as Navin R. Johnson in the movie “The Jerk” did.

  • Where does morality come from?

    My ass. No seriously – morality comes upon principles agreed upon by a society.

  • Are there moral absolutes?

    No there aren’t. There’s a hell of a lot of grey land out there.

  • If there are moral absolutes, could you list a few of them?

    See above.

  • Do you believe there is such a thing as evil? If so, what is it?

    Evil is just a name we assign for things we don’t understand. But there is true evil in government that deceives us.

  • If you believe that the God of the Old Testament is morally bad, by what standard do you judge that He is bad?

    Quite simple – he or his followers murder a whole lot of people.

  • What would it take for you to believe in God?

    He’d have to appear to me in person.

  • What would constitute sufficient evidence for God’s existence?

    Lets see – flaming letters in the sky would be a good start.

  • Must this evidence be rationally based, archaeological, testable in a lab, etc., or what?

    None of hte above.

  • Do you think that a society that is run by Christians or atheists would be safer? Why?

    Absolutely not – just look at the shit that goes on in the Bible Belt in the U.S.

  • Do you believe in free will? (free will being the ability to make choices without coersion).

    Yes I do.

  • If you believe in free will, do you see any problem with defending the idea that the physical brain, which is limited and subject to the neuro-chemical laws of the brain, can still produce free will choices?

    Just because we have wetware it doesn’t mean we have those limitations. Some of us have a more evolved sense of logic.

  • If you affirm evolution and that the universe will continue to expand forever, then do you think it is probable that given enough time, brains would evolve to the point of exceeding mere physical limitations and become free of the physical and temporal, and thereby become “deity” and not be restricted by space and time? If not, why not?

    Well – there are a few technological leaps that have to happen before this is even possible. In fact I’ll put forth that when the time comes we can do that we’ll also get teleportation. Because you see both require very fast and very deep levels of computer memory.

  • If you answered the previous question in the affirmative, then aren’t you saying that it is probable that some sort of God exists?

    No – nice little logical trap you’ve tried here.

 

The latest UPS fuck up

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Well – it seems UPS still lives up to the Shit Wrapped in Chiffon name. I’m of the opinion they made a huge mistake ever becoming more than a metropolitan delivery service. That’s what they were prior to being an international logistics firm and I use the term logistics loosely.

At work I’d ordered an Apple Magic Trackpad for one of the developers. It was supposed to have been delivered on the 12th of November. That comes and goes, no package. It did get delivered on the 18th, six whole days later and one semi-fun phone call to UPS.

Now this is UPS in the Boston, MA area. And the office is located in the same building as the Boston Children’s Museum. So it’s not like it’s some out of the way place.
But I digress – I called UPS on the 17th. They first offered to drop it at a pickup location. Fuck UPS and their pickup locations and I’ll explain why. If I wanted to wait around for 20 minutes while they go through all the packages I’d go for their pickup locations. But fuck UPS.

I explained to the service droid that we were a commercial business and we didn’t do pickup locations. Then I explained to her where we were, what the building was and that we were on the 5th floor, at the far end of the corridor.

And don’t you know the package got delivered on the 18th. But the fact I had to call UPS and bitch them out a bit – that wasn’t necessary.

So I found my other favorite Zipcar

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We were up on Hope St. visiting a little Vinegar and Olive Oil place. When we got there I parked on the street in a Zipcar spot. It’s a trick I use when I need to park and nothing else is available.

Anyhow parked right in front of me, my beloved Volkswagen Golf TSi. License plate matched too. I wish they’d move it back here. The Prius near me has over 30K miles on it. So please Zipcar, please bring the Golf TSi back to Federal Hill/Broadway.

Indian Snacks

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So I think I may have mentioned it but my boss where I work is from India. And he’s figured out I like spicy foods. Even my office mate has tested things like Kick Ass Hot Sauce and Mrs. Renfro’s Ghost Pepper Salsa on me. Love it all.

So anyhow the boss turned me on to this thing called Bakarwadi the English translation of which is Crispy Tasty Spring Roll. There’s these little pastry wrapped and spicy snacks.

We tried ours with Virgil’s Micro-Brewed Root Beer – not bad. The boss tells me it goes good with coffee or tea too. I’ll have to try that next. It puts me in mind of a pepper biscuit. That’s an Italian thing – I’ll likely bring my boss a bag of that and see how he likes it.

The flavor if you will – consider an nice sweet dough wrapped around something that doesn’t hit you right away but then leaves you with a pleasant tingling in the mouth. Fantastic.

Finaly a dock for my MacBook Pro

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It’s a dock made by a company called Henge as in the Henge Dock.

You plop your MacBook Pro into it and tap the dock button. It’s motorized and you hear it inserting the plugs into the MacBook Pro power, Thunderbolt and USB and HDMI ports. It’s pretty awesome. Then out the back you get six USB ports, SD Card slot, Ethernet, two audio jacks, HDMI, and two Thunderbolt ports. It’s awesome.

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And yeah, you can tell I run Skype, Chrome, Dropbox, Sublime, Google Drive, FileZilla, settings, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Shell, Slack on my machine. And fear not – I’m posting this on my personal Windows 10 box. It’s just that all we developers and devops guys get MacBooks where I work.