So the trick to wearing a costume is to be at least as cute as the picture that comes with it:

...going to the store for Hot Dogs and Wine!

Click "read more" to see the recipes.

Like many folks, I occasionally crave chicken strips, but they're pretty awful fat-wise (being deep-fried and all).

Unless you bake 'em:

I just encountered a story at the Consumer Law and Policy Blog that seemed a bit beyond ridiculous. A website that deals with infomercial scams was slapped with a C&D. The weird part is that the C&D itself was, er, "copywritten," ostensibly in the hopes of avoiding embarrassment of the company doing the C&D.

(This is a followup to my previous screed about SJSU's handling of GE certifications.)

After 32 months, literally 160 hours of concentrated effort trying to figure out what happened, and numerous opinions from the various administrative peanut galleries at both Mission College and SJSU, it would appear that my lower-division GE certification is in effect. Barring some catastrophe, I shall no longer have to take any lower-division general education classes, and have only 10 total credit-hours remaining after this semester.

The lessons I learned? First, assume failure at the receiving institution's end and audit continuously. Second, get copies of everything, and keep bugging them until they give you one. Third, be prepared to build a solid case for every line item on your cert anyway, just in case. Fourth, if at first you don't succeed, escalate.

Update: Issue has been Resolved!

This post has been a long time in coming--since I work for SJSU, I had to clear it with the Powers That Be that I'm OK to write such a thing. That said, here's a disclaimer: These are my experiences and opinions, SJSU can't have them :-). This article will be edited and reposted whenever new information becomes available.

For the last two years, seven months, and 25 days (and counting), I've been trying to get San Jose State University to grant me credit for all lower division general education requirements. This is the story of how I got here, why I'm still waiting, and what this might mean for the community at large. Many thanks to the folks at Mission College and the Ombudsman's office at SJSU for their continued help--with any luck, this will be fixed and someday I'll be able to graduate. Click "Read More" to continue.

I'm usually reminded of the amount of work I've done over the years when I spit out some process that only I would know off the top of my head, or when I fix something in seconds that would've taken anyone else hours (or sometimes months!). In short, I'm a pretty good SysAdmin, but it's taken tons of work to get here (and tons more to maintain).

Physical activity, however, is not usually how I'm reminded of how much work it takes to make things seem effortless. Read more below...

So I upgraded glibc. And rebooted. And schmong.org didn't come back up.

A ticket to my provider later, and I have console access (nice). But it took most of the day to happen (not so nice).

Anyway, I'm back, baby!

I last had golumpkies around 1988 or so, but I got a weird craving for them recently and decided to take the recipes I could find and meld them into something decent.

The traditional recipe calls for roasting the stuffed cabbage leaves in tomato sauce (or boiling them in same), but that sounded icky. I decided instead to just steam the whole works in a standard bath (i.e. 1" of water, a steam tray, and a big pot). This made the flavor of the cabbage come to life and made for a relatively light dish (unlike most Eastern European fare).