Month: February 2005

Life gets better one tiny improvement at a time…  

I prefer MSN Mappoint for my mapping needs. They just added paste an address. This will save me a few minutes over the course of the year.

http://mappoint.msn.com/Home.aspx

And I needed it because I am buying this here. 

 

This afternoon I will be entering a Chili-bake-off competition / Superbowl fiesta in Brooklyn.

I grew up eating this Chili and so I felt that I should stay true to my roots and make it for the first time myself.

Chasen’s Chili

This is the stuff of which Hollywood legends are made. Rumor has it back when Elizabeth Taylor was filming Cleopatra in Rome she craved the chili made at Chasen’s Restaurant in Los Angeles so much that she was willing to pay $100 just to have the order shipped to her. For years the recipe remained a closely guarded secret. It seemed the owner David Chasen came to the restaurant every Sunday to privately cook up a batch which he would freeze for the week, believing that the chili was best when reheated.

Recipe at CooksRecipes.com

There is a secret ingredient which has been added especially for today’s version which I reveal after the competition is over.

We’ve been trying to come up with an original name for the Chili. Turns out trying to name Chili is pretty fun. 4×4, Beefcake, Cleopatra, and The Dominator are all in the running.

And Go Pats (but Eagles: please keep it interesting)

Still in training, but I thought I’d share a quick story.

We have a he-she in the room. I’m not sure if he is pre or post op, but whatever, he-she is very nice and I’m not here to make unnecessary fun of him-her. However, he-she is roughly 6’3″ and broad shouldered, but speaks in a relatively feminine sounding voice. The funny part is when he-she sneezes it sounds like a low roar jet-engine.

I am back from New Orleans and straight into a 5–day BizTalk 2004 training class. There’s no internet access or cell phone reception in the room so I am cut-off from the world even though I’m sitting at a computer and without any good reason like vacationing.

There are only like seven people in the class, yet the pace is brutally slow. Day one Ian and I played a lot of minesweeper (did everyone know about the click-both-mouse-button feature? I didn’t.) but that got old. Day two I needed a good old fashioned floppy-disk, no-install game. I chose Rogue. Here’s the DOS version I am playing. Check out those graphics! You are the similey face, you battle Bats, Kestrels, Hobgoblins, etc, collect money, spells, scrolls, weapons, etc. Ian also pointed me towards the updated, hacked version called NetHack. Note there’s nothing net-like about it, but it does enhance the game in all dimensions. I’m sticking with my 1983 version until I get to that damn amulet of Yendor.