Monday: A good day.

Because not only did Julie's MSU presentation go well, but also:

Marshal came to my camp!

He sat in the couch he wanted!

He sat in the couch that everybody sits in!

Tsundere Squirrel unlocked!

Also, also: I now need to write an acceptance letter because I got a new job.

And the moon looked cool.

• Of course, the rest of the world is still a dumpster fire.
• Bear trouble.
• I think it's pretty clear that everyone should watch the new Card Captor Sakura show.

Thinking about papers reminded me of something.

I don't remember the exact details, but in grad school, I was working on a paper, and as it got close to time to submit it, my adviser and I had concerns that we'd get someone we didn't like as a referee.  So one day he suggests that we send the paper to Asshole McGee (again, I don't even remember which paper, or who it was) to ask for "comments before we submit."

Then, after we get a response that we thought was full of shit, we added a nice "The authors thank Asshole McGee for insightful comments on the manuscript" note to the acknowledgments, and sent it in, knowing that that would probably be sufficient protection against Asshole McGee ending up as the referee.

I believe it worked, but it's probably best to do sparingly.

For this paper, I care less about who the referee is, as at this point it's a fait accompli.  Sure, there might be organizational or clarification points, but it's hard to take a six year, multi-petabyte reduction set, and come up with substantial issues with it.  They might disagree with what we did, but there's not really a way to tell us that we were wrong.

Sunday: I have far too many links already in place, so I need to get this post done now

Part 1: Super Bowl

I don't care about this.  I watched the Team Lads vs Team Gents video game version (link to last play of that game) earlier in the week, and checking out the score according to the NYT, not only did they correctly predict the winner, they also seem to have put together a significantly better game.

Part 2: Chili

I made chili again, but didn't bother to do a play-by-play.  I did that two years ago, and don't see any reason to repeat that.  I did skip the stick blender this year, and I think that was the right decision.  The two-year-ago version was really too hot, and I think that's because all the heat was blitzed up into every bite.  The end result puts it just nicely in the hot category.

I still had a Mexican Fanta, so I went with that pairing.  Also cheese, because duh, and doritos, because yummy.

Part 3: Puppy Bowl

First thing: Puppy Bowl has totally sold out.  Everything is branded now, and there are just too many bells and whistles that have been glued on to the show.

Second thing: Someone at Animal Planet decided they were going to steal everyone's DVR this year.  How?

In years past, they just played the PB over and over and over again.  Great.  You can jump in and out as you want.  This year, they've defined the first three showings as different episodes, with titles "First & Goal", "Going for 2" and "Third & Long".  This change was something they did fairly recently, as the last time I checked, there was no episode information.  The implication of this is shown by the probably-invisible outlines in column 2: my DVR sees these as three separate and unique episodes of a series "Puppy Bowl X", and arranges to record them all, bumping any lower priority recordings.  Luckily for me, I didn't have any un-reschedule-able shows during this time, although it did bump my recording of the Hallmark Channel competing Kitten Bowl from the 4pm showing to the 7pm showing.

Third thing: I was going to screenshot the hamster wheel thing, but I'm lazy.  Maybe I'll do that next weekend, when I'll likely do the same kind of thing for the Kitten Bowl.

Part 4: Links

So many tabs.

• Cartoons.
• The Annie awards were yesterday.  I like these results.
• Partially because of this.  Ice King.
• The Rankin of Rankin-Bass died.
• Why would you ever want this?  I can't imagine how puke colored that's going to look while spinning.
• The Joker.
• Animals.
• Squirrel advice.
• Bunnies.
• My Puppy Bowl team is here.  The results are here.  Crap.  Zero points.
• Definitive Puppy Bowl coverage.
• Summary of the games for today.
• Other things.
• I really like this fixture (#5).  This also doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to make, so I wonder why modern Art Deco things aren't being made.
• Scotch werewolf is best werewolf.
• WTF?  You'd think that when someone asks a followup question about how you sound crazy, you wouldn't double down on that crazy.  During a fire: "The closets are right by the door on their way out of each room so it would be possible to be modest on their way out. A robe would even be fine."
• This is my remote control, because I think I'll need to get a new one, as the Vol+ button is flaky now.  I'm posting this so I know which remote control is mine when I decide to get a new one.
• I want to do this with my keys.  Particularly for my building and apartment keys.  Those are the two I need to take with me when I leave the island, and I'd prefer just having a flat thing without needing a ring pointing out into a new dimension.

Thursday: Thanksgiving

I only ended up eating like half of this.

Crap, I still have dessert to eat.

Anyway, thanksgiving food.  Rating things from best to worst

1. Mashed potatoes.  Steaming is always better, as it's faster and doesn't soak them so much.
2. Taro rolls.  I toasted them in the oven a bit too much, and discovered that slightly burned taro rolls taste delicious.
3. Turkey.  It's not very brown, but the strategy I used of just dumping the turkey parts in the cast iron casserole, slapping the lid on it, and roasting it that way seemed to work rather well.  I salted, peppered, and en-sage-enated the turkey as well, to get a bit more flavor in it.  Some of the edge bits are a bit dry, so that's a vote for brining.  Still, impossibly easy to deal with, and lazy is always good.
4. Gravy.  A bit salty, and given the option, don't buy whole wheat flour when you're expecting white.  How was this the only small package of flour?  The other options were five pound and eight pound bags.
5. GBC.  It's GBC.
6. Stuffing.  This ended up bad.  The flavor is just not good.  I think that I need to just toss all my spices and buy new ones.

Links.

• Bunnies.  Watch the bunny paws.
• I discovered this last night.  That is exactly the model that I have, that I used for the turkey.  I guess I should contact them, and see what the plan is.  If they're going to replace mine with a new one of equivalent size, then that's fine.  Otherwise, I may just keep and use this one.  I've had it for like six years now, and have never had any problems like that.
• I'm 99% certain Mr. Mime just stole that plate of spaghetti from Wooper.
• Squirrels.
• Thanksgiving.
• I noticed the same thing while watching the parade.  Way to hide the fact that you're bringing back Sharkleberry Fin, Kool-aid.  It's not Purplesaurus Rex, but still.

Oh, yeah.  I watched the parade.  Here's a cut so you don't have to load like 20MB of images if you don't really want to.  But really, what else are you doing right now?  Go on.  Click it.

I've been wanting this for years

In tcsh (since that's what I use, so if you use bash, you'll have to write this yourself):

alias postcmd 'if ( "\!#:0" =~ "http*" ) wget \!#:0'
http://www.littlepuppy.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/puppies-2.jpg



--2012-05-05 12:12:06--  http://www.littlepuppy.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/puppies-2.jpg
Resolving www.littlepuppy.org (www.littlepuppy.org)... 66.147.244.53
Connecting to www.littlepuppy.org (www.littlepuppy.org)|66.147.244.53|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 28027 (27K) [image/jpeg]
Saving to: `puppies-2.jpg'


100%[======================================>] 28,027      64.5K/s   in 0.4s    


2012-05-05 12:12:07 (64.5 KB/s) - `puppies-2.jpg' saved [28027/28027]


http://www.littlepuppy.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/puppies-2.jpg: Command not found.
Exit 1

So, with this postcmd defined, anytime you paste an http based url to the command line, and execute it like a command, it runs wget to fetch that url for you.