Let’s Go Fishing!

by John Eddy | Apr 24, 2016 | Uncategorized

It all started when a friend posted to a private facebook group linking to this Craigslist posting…

Sure, that’s creepy, but… not as creepy when I read a friends reply saying ‘Hey, that’s a realtor down here… http://www.bcre.com/agents/sam-smith/‘

It has been a while since I tried to play with someone, so… why not… A quick free stock image search later and I sent off a quick email.

Was I sloppy? Yes. I forgot my display name was a very ambiguous Rev JD. I also forgot to change the name of the stock photo. That might come back to bite me, but.. for now… we play the waiting game.

via GIPHY

The Sides of the Scalia Vacancy

by John Eddy | Feb 18, 2016 | Uncategorized

Wow, that sure got politicized real quick, but then, really, it should be. It’d be just as if he retired suddenly. It isn’t his death that’s politicized, it is the vacancy.

And really, that’s fine. It is a political position, at least in that it is a seat in government.

There seems to be three camps in the “Obama shouldn’t nominate anyone” parade.

Obama shouldn’t bother to nominate anyone because we’ll just block it.

You know, that’s fine. The constitution only gives the President the right to nominate, not the requirement for the Congress to approve it. If the end goal of this statement is ‘Don’t bother, it’s just wasting time,’ I can accept that as a valid statement. It might be pig-headed, mule-stubborn, and a whole bunch of jiggery-pokery with the rules, but, that’s just advice.

Obama shouldn’t nominate anyone because he’s a lame duck president.

This, this isn’t fine. I mean, sure, if it was January 3rd, I might be willing to side with you. Heck, if it was after the first Thursday in November (or, if it was after Dec 12th in 2000), I could even see my way to agreeing with you, regardless of who won the election, because that’s REALLY a lame duck President, and I see those last months of a presidency as the time when the West Wing should be running at the speed of Emergency Only While We Prepare Close Up Shop and Bring the New Stewards Up To Speed.

Obama CAN’T nominate anyone because he’s a lame duck president.

Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve actually heard anyone say this. I know I’ve heard shouldn’t and shouldn’t bother, but all the ‘Can’t’ seems to be coming from people saying what the other side is saying, not actually what the other side is saying.

Like I said, I don’t have a problem with shouldn’t bother, except in the issues it shows with our government. It really comes down to:

Person A: I am going to do this thing that I am legally entitled to do.

Person B: Yeah, well, we’re going to do this thing that we are legally entitled to do that will prevent you, so you might not want to bother.

And there isn’t anything wrong with that. Kinda. If you’re going to argue that the Congress shouldn’t bully the President like this, I want you to step back and think if the parties were reversed, would you still feel the same way? If so, I agree with you. If you don’t, then you’re being partisan.

#InYallQaedasName

by John Eddy | Jan 13, 2016 | Uncategorized

So, I was sitting around, laughing about #YallQaeda taking over some bird preserve and then getting a bunch of dildos and candy dicks and complaining about it.

And I’ll be honest, this is an awesome image.

I even joked that, to appease his wishes of ‘no more dildos’, we send them butt plugs instead.

And when Max Temkin of Cards Against Humanity did what he did so well..

I sent a 55-gallon drum of personal lubricant to the Oregon Militia pic.twitter.com/qIKp8Ucl2K

— Max Temkin (@MaxTemkin) January 14, 2016

…well, I rejoiced.

But, you know, as I read something Cowboy Hat McChucklehead said in this article, I had a revelation.

“It’s sad that there are people who would spend this kind of money on this rather than spending it to do good in the world,” Ritzheimer said in the video.

He’s right.

So, here’s my plan.

Let’s donate money to causes that will piss them off.

In their name.

So they get thank you cards.

Let’s call this…. #InYallQaedasName. Give, tweet it out, point to this post. Let’s make this big. I have no idea if this is going to work, but, I’m going to try…

I’ll add more ideas as they come up, but lets start here:
Planned Parenthood (Nevada would be good, seeing as the Bundy’s reside there)
National Parks Foundation
CAIR

This is not a moment, it’s a movement.

1/14 Edit:
Added National Parks Foundation to donation lists. So far, I’ve given $25 to both PP and NPF.

Time to Make the Donuts

by John Eddy | Dec 25, 2015 | Uncategorized

So, a few weeks back, we had a wonderful visitor who was celiac (and had been) and, as Patricia has recently been diagnosed celiac as well (AND was avoiding gluten/soy), I wanted to make everyone a special little something.

Coincidentally Chef Steps, a wonderful little organization in Seattle that I’d love to work for if only I was smarter, had recently posted an old-fashioned donut recipe that I was pretty sure we could convert to not only Gluten Free, but dairy free as well.

Before we go too far, let’s look at they original recipe. Go on, go read it. You’ll be shocked at how easy it really is. The first time I made it, even counting the substitutions, the dough took about 30 minutes of work tops, and I’m slow.

They came out well, although it didn’t produce the burst top you expect out of an old fashioned, likely due to the GF dough.

Flash forward to now. I wanted something a bit more Christmas-y, that didn’t take much work, and would last for morning breakfast while my in-laws were in town. Something I could mix up when they got here, and we could just fry up a few donuts each morning.

Unless, of course, they ate almost all of them each time I made them.

Back when we were active on Cook Local, we had a wonderful little Pumpkin Pie Cinnamon Roll recipe. Patricia wanted to make it for Christmas morning, but we were already looking at making an amazing lasagna, not to mention a paella for Christmas Eve.

So, let’s Dr. Frankenstein a little donut/pumpkin pie cinnamon roll mashup together, shall we?

First, lets look at the substitutions… and note that I’m doing a half recipe.

While Patricia is fine with butter, the sour cream had to go (why they don’t make Goat’s Milk sour cream, I don’t know) and the tofutti sour cream was out too. Fun fact, though, a small cup of plain non-cow Greek yogurt (Thank you, John Stamos), mixed with a teaspoon of lemon juice will give you a pretty accurate tasting sour cream. SCIENCE!

So, that subs out the sour cream. And to that, let’s add 3/4 cup of pumpkin puree.

That’s all the changes in the first step.

Step two, while you deal with the dry ingredients, the measure out the flour (I used Bob’s Gluten Free 1:1 Baking Flour), and then add in an extra third cup of flour to make up for the added wet from the pumpkin, as well as:

• 3 tsp cinnamon
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves

From this point on, the recipe is exactly the same. We tried glazing some, but it wasn’t the right flavor. Plain was spot on, and just dusting with powdered sugar was a fantastic sugar high and well worth the price of admission.

All in all, even if I never use the deep fryer for any other recipe, these donuts would be enough.

Star Wars: The Force MacGuffins

by John Eddy | Dec 23, 2015 | Uncategorized

Right, this is going to be totally a spoilery post. I won’t even try to do anything more than put in a bunch of spaces and a gif so that people can not read it.
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SPACE IS MY JAM

First, lets talk about things that I loved that I’m sure some people will hate:

C-3PO’s red left arm and Poe Dameron’s escape.

Personally, I loved the fact that they completely glossed over them. C-3PO might be covered in some of the official pre-TFA canon, but as for how Poe got off a relatively hostile planet (as in swarming with bad guys), while I’m sure it would make a great side story/comic book arc, I’m fine with it being ‘Why does it matter? He got off the planet. Period.’

I didn’t quite like the ending, but I still haven’t figured out why. It might simply be that it went on for too long. Maybe after so much noise and action, that amount of silence was off-putting.

But what I really didn’t like was the MacGuffin.

The map.

See, the map that they got had the location of Luke Skywalker on it.

But the stars present in that map didn’t match any known pattern of stars in the galaxy.

Except… when they finally figure it out, they only figured it out by putting it into a map of the rest of the galaxy that was hidden away in R2 or some storage unit somewhere.

The hell?

They’re able to make technology that can travel through hyperspace, shields that can block physical intrusion, space ships that can hold thousands of people, anti-gravity units that allow you to walk on the ship, but they can’t write an algorithm that would simply take the pattern of systems on the map and rotate the galaxy around until they found a match?

We have, on this planet, a piece of software that can take a song you are hearing and figure out what that song is, something that I had trouble figuring out how it would be done (although a friend gave me some tips as to how it would need to be done, and now I kind of get it), but they can’t map a 3-dimensional model to pattern match?

IStandWithAhmed…

by John Eddy | Sep 16, 2015 | Uncategorized

…My bosses, not so much.

Last night, after a few drinks, I mailed someone more sober than I that I felt we, as the curators of the Microsoft Developer ecosystem’s social media channels, should be doing something around Ahmed because tearing apart a clock and playing with its innards and building a new clock is the exact ethos that we should encourage.

This is the future. It is a young person, interested in technology, willing to explore it, and willing to build; to not just be a user, but to be a creator, an explorer, and a builder.

For that, he was arrested. If they hadn’t walked him out of the school in handcuffs, I’d be willing to bet this would have just disappeared from history. But they did, and it won’t.

Now, as I said, I mailed. And waited. And waited.

The response came.

To paraphrase..

I see where you’re coming from and you’re right, this would be in our wheelhouse, but, see, all the decision makers are at an offsite so I don’t think we could get anything done with any speed, so we’ll just skip this one. Any other week, sure.

Once twitter offered him an internship, I knew we were too late for that front, but hey, we still got a great research group and I’m sure we could do something. But fine, fine, fine.

And then, at 6p Pacific, our CEO announced a 75 million dollar investment in YouthSpark.

What is YouthSpark, you ask? “Microsoft YouthSpark expands youth programs for computer science education”

So to say I want to flip a table… That’s an understatement.

Can We Stop Using This Bill Gates Quote?

by John Eddy | Sep 5, 2015 | Uncategorized

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
– Bill Gates

I’ve seen it quoted a lot.

It sounds right, on the surface, but if you think about it, is it really right?

I mean… Here, let me talk about a ‘bug’ some customers found way back when. A number of customers who had bought Microsoft Small Business Server were complaining that they didn’t get their Outlook discs in the package.

A large enough number that we had to make a procedure to get the people missing discs.

Over time, it was discovered that what happened was this. The company who was contracted to put together the SBS boxes weigh full crates, not individual boxes.

The weight of 30 copies of SBS doesn’t take into account if two Outlook discs are in 15 of the boxes but the other 15 have none.

A program doesn’t have a fixed number of lines that defines when it is complete. An airplane, on the other hand, does have a fixed weight (plus or minus) and, assuming you know the weight before and after each step, you can, in fact, measure the progress of building an aircraft by the weight of it, much like you can measure the progress of a box of software being put together by the weight of the box.