Translation : Happy New Year 2018. 2017 was a crappy year – what with the Orange Goblin taking office, the installment of cabinet officers who should be floating face down in the water, and all that stuff.

Here’s to hoping in 2018 is better.  Here’s to my desire hat President Drumpf aka Trump either dies, is impeached or his brain turns to tapioca necessitating his removal from office. Also lets hope for a Democratic re-capture of control of the house or senate.

So the other day I made a fritata. In essence take eggs, potatoes, onions, shallots, green onions or whatever you have that would be good with eggs which is pretty much everything.

That one went over well but I made one today using six eggs, instead of only four. Then four slices of Trader Joe’s apple smoked bacon, some finely diced potato, two leek stalks chopped and washed, and some mushrooms. Also added some herbs de Provence. And added some freshly grated parmagiano regiano cheese to the eggs.

The potato, bacon, leeks and mushrooms were pre-cooked. Then the whole thing into a cast iron pan, into a 400F oven for 8 to 13 minutes.

Now let me explain, bacon, leeks and the herbs – it’s fucking heavenly. The whole house was redolent with the smell of those.

Here’s what it looks like on the plate:

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That looks awesome – you can see the bits of bacon,t he leeks, and the potato sticking out. Love it!

So the evolution of audio output devices is sort of fascinating to me. The first ones used the standard 3.5mm connector. Only issue with this is the connector on the device they plug into uses cheap spring tension and so wear out with repeated plugging and unplugging.

This moved us to wireless audio devices. A long time ago we had a pair of 900MHz headphones. They were sufficient for the time. But when batteries are proprietary and they wear out so too those devices get tossed in the trash heap.

So we’ve been using headphones for some time – I still have my Symphonized Magnums –
But they look a bit weird with a bluetooth dongle hanging off them. So I switched over to Fueladture NB-9’s –

The NB-9’s sound really good and have 45 hours of usage on a charge. Those are it’s good points. It has two failure points, the hinge on which the headphones mount is cheap plastic, and so to the headband. I’ve gone through three pairs of these.

Someone though – for some reason always cracks the headband.

So I’d been searching for in-ear phones. I gave him my pair that I’d had but the audio on them was sub par.

Then I cam across these. They are Photive TWS-01’s and fascinating earphones. There’s no wire between them – they just sync to each other and then via bluetooth.

And that case – it’s the charge for the earphones. Only drawback thus far is make sure you’re fully conscious when you set these up as it involves a slightly tricky process of turning on the left channel. The other thing is they’re so small they need to be kept track of lest you lose a channel as happened last night. But it was found so all is well.

I’ve been watching a ton of that Mitchell and Webb Look on YouTube. I find it amusing as all hell.

For example, here is their sketch Evil Vicar:

And playing on the Evil Vicar theme:

And then in a twist the one titled Are We the Baddies?

 

 

So going to my cousins place in Chepachet, RI was interesting. You see we took a wrong turn because the GPS was a little unclear on it’s directions.

So I figured I’d pull into a driveway and do a three point turn and get myself turned around. Except we get over the lip of the driveway and I throw the car in reverse and the traction control of course rev limits the engine. That’s got to be one of the stupidest things modern cars implement. There should be an easily identifiable switch to turn that ‘feature’ the hell off.

But then I remembered, when trying to get past a snow bank blocking you reversing try to get a running start. So I pulled further into the driveway and just nailed the gas – sure enough shot right out of the driveway. So I still remember how to get out of a situation when your’e stuck in snow.

Even though I’m an atheist the tradition is still there. Spent a good chunk of today at my cousin’s place out in Chepachet, RI. The woods are oh so lovely, dark and deep out there. And the road names are descriptive, for example Snake Hill, Chestnut Hill and the like.

It’s interesting getting there the roads were a bit slippery as we had some snow today. Hopefully it’ll be gone soon. The car was my least favorite the 2016 Ford Focus – my biggest gripe about the car is the transaxle – the gears are imprecise.

The trip out, had to use the navigation on my phone. I can never remember how to get there for some reason. It’s an area of the state I don’t visit often.

But coming back, we got to RI-101 then RI-6 – I told someone that we could have just taken that back as 6 dumps right into Olneyville. Or get on the highway and there’s a Broadway exit right there, so down Broadway to Andrews and then Grove and finally Knight where we live.

It was a good time, my aunt, her husband, my uncle Richard, and then my cousin’s kids Richard and Anthony were there. Even my cousin Rhonda showed up. And my cousin Richard – his ex-wife Sharon came too.

 

So yesterday marked the end of Saturnalia, one of the Roman holidays that Christmas is based upon. Saturnalia normally runs December 17th to December 23 – the Romans knew how to throw a party for their gods. And being that Roman is part of my ancestry – I thought it appropriate to acknowledge the god Saturn and the celebration that ensued.

Now you know I’m an atheist. The above is tongue in cheek. But it goes to show how much Christians hijacked from the Romans, the Pagans, etc. The trees and lights – the Pagans. The gift thing comes from the Romans.

So happy Holidays to everyone, and joyous and prosperous new year.

 

When it comes to the living room seating area is primary. And for that I’ve always been a fan of leather. You see, cats like to scratch everywhere. Leather can take it better than cloth or material can. I do have to get some cleaner and conditioner for the leather though – but that’s applied every few months.

It’s funny someone I worked with long ago said leather gets cold. I don’t think it does. Plus just sit in it for a minute or two and body heat is enough to make it comfy. And in the summer yes it can be sticky but a judiciously place fan and air conditioner handle that just fine.

Well, not so much explore as I have experience with set theory, and logic. But topology has always interested me and watching the video below spawned me to advance my mathematical knowledge a bit more.

So I ordered the Kindle version of the book titled “Elementary Point-Set Topology: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics” by Andre Yandl and Adam Bowers.

It’s going to be a fun read I can tell you that – and it also gets delivered to the Fire Tablet of either one of my nieces or my nephew. It’ll be good for them to read this too.

It occurs to me – had they gone further like this when I was in school I probably would have gone down the mathematics road. I always wanted to know WHY certain proofs were axiomatic, now of course I’m finding out exactly why.

And right now I’m about 20 pages into it and I’m realizing I know this already – the truth tables are pretty prevalent in the I.T. world. And concepts like AND, OR, NOT are too.

So I’ve been ordering Angie the cat’s food on Amazon for about a year. It’s allowed me to figure out how much she eats per day.

It’s fascinating, she goes through about 1.8-2.0 oz. of cat food per day. That’s something I like about Amazon, it keeps a history of your orders – and I’ve got 15 years of history on Amazon – so it allows me to track purchase history and I can do the math to arrive at the range above.

This fascinates me – I don’t know though about Amazon having an entire history. I mean I’ve bought some things on there that could be viewed as subversive – but then that’s me in a nutshell. The definition of subversive “seeking or intended to subvert an established system or institution.” Yup that’s me.

It’s funny when you think about it how much the likes of Amazon, Google have so much data on us.