Today is winter solstice - the only place to go from here is up.



A happier Basra




Boys of summer

The new Cards Against Humanity trump card.

On Thursday Emily, Carrie, Lindsay, Julie and Andrew came over to decorate cookies with (e:terry) and I. Well I should say bake too, because I rode home so late I made Lindsay roll out the dough so we could bake them.

We used all my mom's cut outs and decorations including Bufanda, the holiday character no one knew about. For icing we made one out of eggnog and powdered sugar since we had no real milk. I was eating it out of the bowl by the end of the night.

I don't really have any pictures of them decorated because we ate them all while sang Usher and JoJo.




Bufanda the holiday character








All finished frosting

Every year, my family celebrates fesitvus, ala Seinfeld. Its basically a pointless holiday they made up in reaction to commericalism of Christmas, where you "air your grievances" with everyone. The tree is substituted with a metal pole, theres a weird dinner, and the night ends when the head of the household (in the case the dog) is pinned during a "feat of strength" . Its kind of hard to explain without having seen the episode but its bizarre and fun. Here's a website about it that looks like its stuck in the 90s as well.

On Wednesday, I picked up Mary from the train station (2 hours after it was supposed to arrive) after dropping off Alex (you owe me gurrrrl, next time its the 16 bus for you) and headed home for festivus. I was going to bring Terry but it got too late, which is too bad because my parents really wanted him to come. Dinner was a carbfest since my mom was sick - homemade mac and cheese, toasted raviloi, a big salad, bagels, and the biggest freaking snickers I've seen for dessert (eaten with a fork and knife - also Seinfeld).

I love my family but everytime we're all home together I realize how much we just scream, even in a regular conversation. I guess when you have that many people in a small space its what happens. Even Midnight barked like crazy the whole night.

I should have taken a picture of the grievances, they're the best part.

While running on Linwood yesterday I found this Russian cassette tape in the snow. First of all who in Buffalo is still listening to cassettes in English, much less Russian. I can't imagine its a huge demographic. And how did it end up in the street?

Google Translate says its labeled the "Aprelevka Order of Lenin Plant Records", 1990. Sounds like my jam. I would have kept it to confirm, but it smelled like a old lady perfume/car air freshener - almost as bad as the one I spilled in my car and (e:xandra) got all over her. I also don't know where I'd even find a tape player - maybe my parents house.

Update: looking around more I found that Aprelevka was a city in the USSR with the largest record factory in the country. The factory was called "The Order of Lenin" as sort of a title. So it must be a blank tape that was made there? Still weird! Wiki

Lately I've been trying to read articles auf Deutsch for practice and I keep coming across articles about Miley calling her a skandalnudel. I was so confused what nudel (noodles obvs) have to do with skanking it up, and neither (e:paul) or (e:terry), or even Paul's German friend Yvonne seemed to know what it was referring to. So I asked German subreddit and quickly got an answer:

Nudel:
Wiktionary: [3] umgangssprachlich, meist mit einem Attribut: Bezeichnung für einen Menschen mit einer bestimmten Eigenschaft
Duden: 5. (umgangssprachlich) [weibliche] Person, die der Sprecher [wohlwollend oder spöttisch] in einer bestimmten Verhaltensweise o. Ä. charakterisiert
DWDS: [3] salopp, scherzhaft, übertragen bezeichnet eine Person; Person, Mensch in Verbindung mit bestimmten Adjektiven

and

In my youth that was a woman called Ingrid Steeger. At that time (around the eighties) it meant flashing your tits on TV. I guess nowadays you'd have to leak your home made porn movie to raise a fraction of that attention and earn the prestigeous title Skandalnudel. ;)

Apparently it means that causing scandals is an attribute of that person, or a way to mock a woman's behavior.
I don't even know people learned this stuff without the internet.
In other news, I got a 7 of 7 on the Miley quiz on the German version of TMZ.
Test your skills!

Yesterday was the official release of both Fedora 20 and the Android 4.3 update for the Galaxy Note II.

The Android 4.3 update finally came after taking forever to go through AT&T. The changes aren't major but it's definitely updated and flattened a bit visually, especially the Samsung TouchWiz stuff. The gallery finally is way better in terms of arranging and selecting photos, like the new geotag view option and the different preview sizes. For some reason they removed the shortcut buttons on the lockscreen, so you have to unlock to get to the camera shortcut. The best part is the application manager now lets you turn off any app, even the built-in AT&T garbage that you can't uninstall.
The screen seems to be brighter and higher contrast too, although it's been sucking down battery way faster than before. Samsung claims they improved memory usage and GPU hardware rendering, I haven't done anything to that shows a huge difference. I hope we get KitKat relatively soon, where a virtual secure element will let anyone use Google Wallet's NFC.





I also upgraded my laptop from Fedora 19 to Fedora 20. (e:Paul) got me trying Linux about 3 months ago and since then I've barely touched my Windows 8 partition. Just the terminal alone makes doing things on the computer so much easier than a mish mosh of GUI and command line things in Windows. Even powershell can't come close to touching it. The only thing I miss in Linux is a Adobe Lightroom replacement. There is an open source alternative, Darktable (link) but it doesn't compare for post processing or library management.

Anyway, Fedora 20 added some pretty awesome stuff even if they seem to be trying to apple-fy themselves. The upgrade didn't actually work out at first for Paul, since the official upgrade method, FedUp, was broken. They added Gnome Maps, which seems alright, but not as good as Google Maps (it uses mapquest data, wtf?). The Wifi geolocation also places us in Kansas for some reason.

Gnome Maps - Thinks we're still in Kansas

The system preferences and chrome updates make it more Mac like by merging the title bar and menu bar, combining all off the notifications and controls into one menu in the corner.






There were also tons of backend changes too. The biggest is probably that ARM is now an official platform for Fedora, which makes sense since there are so many more devices now. SSD caching for hard disks is now in the kernel which should speed things up. There are also a ton of virtualization improvements like external notifications for the VM manager and LVM thin provisioning in the updates kernel. Thun provisioning isnkind of awesone becauee you can pook storage space between different devices. Ex if you have multiple users who have changing sotrage demands and a limited amount of storage, they can all share the existing storage and it can be allocated on demand. I can see that getting messy if tons of devices start requesting space at the same time but its still neat.
I never would use a lot of the features because I have no need to virtualize anything but I can imagine it makes administering a bunch of VMs on a server a lot easier.

I love using Linux now on everything, it really makes going back to XP at work painful.

I had to make a dessert for the office holiday luncheon tomorrow. I was not feeling it at all since it was for work, but I made some shortening free peanut butter blossoms using this recipie. It took about an hour and a half to make instead of the recipies 20 minutes. They turned out well especially right out of the oven. Pretty sure (e:xandra) cleared a quarter tray.

Today I busted out the new snow tires and rode to work. I bought the Scwhalbe Marathon Winter Studded tires for $140. it was so expensive but I definitely think they're worth it.

It snowed overnight so the roads were super sloppy and slippery on the way to work this morning. I barely felt any slip on the road while cars were having trouble keeping traction. The rolling resistance was a lot higher but these are also puncture resistant, compared to my super thin Bontragers. Unfortunately a lot of paths weren't plowed especially along the lake and from Route 5 to work. With any kind of loose snow I lost most of the grip although the bike never slid out. I either had to take the lane or carry my bike over snow drifts.

The whole ride took about an hour each way, when my typical route is a mile and a half shorter and takes about 35 minutes. I think I can probably shave 10 or 15 minutes off when the roads are less snowy and more icy, but we'll have to see.


Beastly new tungsten carbide studs

My Bontragers are looking pretty worn :(

Ready to leave from work

Union Ship Canal

Unplowed bridge over the canal - I had to carry my bike over the snow here

(e:paul) and I got around to moving Basra up from the basement. He's been so miserable, freezing/hibernating and all neglected down there that we moved him up to the brown room. We started to clean up his carpet and the basement before discovering that the tarp underneath started to mold from the floor's dampness. So gross. Then we set out to search for a new tarp - but Home Depot was closed. We had to drive all the way to Sheridan Drive for Walmart. While we were there we stopped at the Super Bazaar (see (e:Paul,58458)).

After we got back, we set up the new tortoise sanctuary in the brown room. It was so much warmer that he came alive right away. He should, because according to the Killawatt it takes almost $65 a month of electricity to heat him. Other downside, there may be an impending scooter infestation.