We got mudified...

Mein Rich undt mein self got muddy this past weekend. Rich got very slightly muddy. I got 'dug yourself out of your own grave' muddy. The best part was that I was fairly clean until we were coming back to the main parking area on the main trail and I went down a steep, muddy, slippery hill and at the bottom was a virtual bog o' mud. It was one of those mud bogs that makes you think "Damn, I'd sure hate to fall into that."











I make it down the slippery hill, and I need to explain that I'm tired by this point as the riding we were doing is very technical (tight trails, steep downslopes with large rocks, big slippery power hill climbs - but fun), I hit the bog knowing that I need to power through; unfortunately my front tire was in one underwater rut, and my back tire went into a different underwater rut and my back end threw out left. This had the interesting effect of catapulting me to the right and a bit over my handlebars and BLAM did I hit that mud with a spectacular splash. Rich tells me it was impressive from his vantage point.







Anyhow, here's a few pics that don't really do the mud justice (especially on the bike.) It took me hours to wash that thing off.

Eggbeaters

I recently tried out Eggbeaters for the first time and have to say that I was quite happy with them. I made a great omelette using the Southwestern variety.

The website is a little kitsch and oddly 80's (at least to me) but there's nothing wrong with the product itself.

The point of Eggbeaters is that Eggs are a great source of protein and relatively low in calorie; however, they are ridiculously high in cholesterol which is almost entirely found in the yolk and not the egg whites (hence all the 'egg white omelette' orders you've heard.) Of course, because God has a sense of humour, virtually all the vitamin benefits of eggs are also in that cholosteral filled yolk. Eggbeaters makes their product out of the white but adds vitamins to make up for those lost in removing the yolks. This results in cutting the calorie count in half, eliminating all the fat and cholesterol.

I had mistakenly assumed that they were some sort of facsimile or vegan analog to eggs when in fact they're just egg whites fortified with things like beta carotene. (Beta carotene gives the Eggbeaters a normal yellow color as well.)


They come in flavored varieties as well: Garden vegetable, Southwestern, Cheese & chive. The sodium content is a touch high in some of the flavoried varieties, but not bad if you don't throw salt on your food (which you shouldn't need to if you're making it anyhow.)

Can someone please explain to me why Flash requires a zero byte terminator?

I ran into this years ago when adding network TCP/IP stream support for 3rd party clients and one of the companies wanted to use Flash to consume our AI and I couldn't understand why the damn thing couldn't receive responses (they were using XMLSocket in Actionscript) and there was zero information at the time because this was a new 'feature' of Flash. I only figured it out (luckily) when I noticed that n batched commands to the AI resulted in n-1 responses showing up in Flash. I figured we were missing a terminator. Why flash wouldn't need a terminator on multiple submissions but need one on a single submission is beyond me, anyhow, anybody out there understand the reasoning behind this? I'm consolidating some networking code and I really would like to eliminate this 'special case' in some fashion as I have two socket::send methods, one for normal properly behaving (imho) clients and one for flash that adds an extra zero byte explicitly into the TCP/IP stream. *** End Rant ***

When dwarves go bad...

Ananova carried a rather amusing 'quirky' today related to the growing incidence of long distance coach robberies being carried out by dwarves... Enjoy!

New Toy Time!

Mein Rich undt mein self now both have new off road toys! Yeah! He's a vastly more experienced motocross/trail rider than myself as I've not ridden like this in decades, so he's got the 'tear your arms out of your sockets' KDX and I've gotten myself what I think is a good beginner's bike, a 2002 KTM 400 EXC. It's a four stroke (the KDX is a two stroke monster) so it's a bit more docile but it's got good torque throughout the power band so I'm sure I can enjoy this bike for a long while to come.

We're headed off to something-town next Saturday, stay tuned for pictures of damaged bikes/riders/egos then! :)

When gacutil /u goes bad (on Vista...)

Just a note to anyone using gacutil on Vista, make sure you start the command prompt with administrative permissions prior to trying to uninstall an assembly, otherwise you get the oh so informative "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process" message.

A pattern developing...

I forgot to mention, when blogging about my new t-shirt from the boss, that a friend and previous co-worker had awarded me a 'Happy Bunny' to display on the door to my old office.

He mentioned that I left that out when talking about how sweet I am as a person, so in the interest of complete disclosure, there's my bunny :).