Category: Life

Nine Months

I keep thinking about my blog and it keeps sitting on the back burner. It’s not for lack of things I could be talking about, shit in the past 9 months, I’ve…

  • competed in a city league ski racing league, and our team won the whole season
  • had the worst Christmas ever #christmasfail08
  • been [positively] excited about a presidential inauguration
  • played a UO officially sanctioned flip cup tournament with the club sports olympics, and we WON
  • broke a slalom ski 🙁
  • went from 5 down to 2 e-mail accounts, and one of those may be going a way soon
  • met a girl, her name is Angela, many of you have even met her by now
  • graduated from college!!!!!!!!!
  • successfully survived a road trip with Angela through 9 states
    • Yellowstone, Ren Faire, Badlands, Wall Drug, SLC, etc…
  • partaken in a few dancing lessons (ssssh! don’t tell anyone!)
  • somehow convinced Angela to buy a Mac
  • dealt with 2 flat tires in 2 different states I don’t live in, and neither one on my personal vehicle
  • turned 27
  • competed in 9 waterski tournaments in 6 different states, and waterskied in a 7th state
    • including Collegiate National All-Stars for slalom+trick, and AWSA Western Regionals for 3-event (and qualified for but didn’t go to AWSA Nationals)!
  • upgraded my wordpress blog, twice, without posting anything
  • volunteered with a church group on a construction project
  • bought a Playstation 2 from a thrift store for $12.50 and repaired it myself
  • sold my old DSLR and bought a spiffy new one, and taken thousands of photos with it
  • attended a number of concerts
  • given up on my football team, due to some unFavreable circumstances
  • finally started getting my online portfolio and résumé up-to-date

…and some other stuff too, I assure you. But now that you’re updated on my life, maybe now I can get this site fully back on track again?

General Tso’s Chicken, finally success

In what seemed like destined failure once again, I finally had a successful batch of General Tso’s Chicken. I believe this was my third or fourth attempt from scratch (+1 attempt using sauce from a bottle). The first hint I was in trouble was when I realized I had no corn starch (used as a breadding), so I used pancake powder. Then when mixing up the sauce, I realized I didn’t have any red wine/cooking sherry. Instead I used a little bit of white wine vinegar with some water, and a little bit of Berry Splash Crystal Light powder (weird, definitely. but it came out just fine), and a little extra soy sauce. No onions? No big deal, though it is a key part of this dish, I was mainly concerned about the sauce coming out ok.

Tiny bit of back-story. General Tso’s Chicken is one of my favorite Chinese dishes, especially at Maple Garden near campus. I’ve never seen any other resteraunt make it anywhere near close to the way they do, and I have no idea what it’s supposed to be like, but it’s damn good. So it’s been a goal of mine for the past 3 years or so to figure out how to make a decent batch of it. I’m getting closer… I’m guessing another 2 attempts and I’ll have a recipe worthy of sharing.

What are you doing up at this hour?

gcal-ical-sync

That’s what Toni asked me about 2hrs ago. Followed by:

Me: getting my calendars set up to sync through google
Toni: sounds exciting there
Me: 🙂 you have no idea
Toni: lol
Toni: you are an odd one

Anyways this is fairly brilliant. Google Calendar is the brains of the operation, where the data is stored and whatnot. Sure I exported most of my calendars straight from iCal, but then I set up the calendars to utilize Google Calendar’s new calDAV service (Google’s instructions). So now I can edit events on my iMac at home, the iMac at work, even on my iPod Touch, and it’ll sync up to the gCloud, and back down to my computers/iPod, and essentially be the same everywhere.

Caveat here is regarding the iPod Touch. I only see the “live” calendars when using Google’s mobile interface, the Apple Calendar interface needs to get plugged in at home to sync. Same with posting, it if i post to Apple Calendar, nothing goes live until I plug & sync at home. And obviously Google Calendar needs to be within earshot of wi-fi access.

This is all acceptable though, wi-fi seems ubiquitous enough for when I’m hopping between computers, and when I’m not (say, when I visit the family cabin in Minnesota), the iPod Touch will be the only device I have for keeping schedules, so it’ll “just work”.

The one thing I don’t understand, is why do each of my Google Calendars need seperate CalDAV accounts in iCal? This is makes it a pain the ass to set up, but after the fact is mainly cosmetic (see image above, and click to enlarge).

Hmm.. ramblomatic blogger? I’m going to bed.