Wouter's Blog – Page 39 – Who said it was your cheese in the first place?

A true visionary

“He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”

“Who?”

“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”

— Ayn Rand, 1957

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

— Barack Obama, 2012

It’s been too long since I’ve waded through Atlas Shrugged.

Thanks for jogging the memory, Jennifer.

2012-08-08 by wrm Geek 0

R.I.P. Jon Lord

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72jJh_e6eeg

I grew up with this guy :-)

2012-07-17 by wrm Uncategorized 1

Springbok pot

I got this recipe from Van Rensburgs Foods.

Fry two large onions in a knob of butter until brown. Remove from pot.

Brown springbok skenkels (shin) in batches. Add onions back in. Add boiling water to cover meat halfway.

Simmer for an hour, add 10ml salt, 60ml Worcestershire sauce, 10 peppercorns, 10 cloves.

Simmer for half an hour, add four cubed potatoes, four carrots sliced into 1cm chunks, 75gr currants, 75gr sultanas.

Simmer for half an hour, add a few shakes chutney.

When the carrots and potatoes are done, serve (with rice works well).

Gore alert: Don’t click on “more” if you’re a sensitive viewer who believes that meat grows in polystyrene containers in the shops.

2012-07-01 by wrm Foooooood Guns 0

Kitchendle

It’s the 21st Century, baby!

Creamy smoked chicken, bacon and mushroom fettuccine

Ingredients

1 small onion, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
One pack (400 gr) bacon, cut in small pieces
One punnet mushrooms, halved or quartered

2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary, chopped
375ml Light & Creamy evaporated milk
1 tablespoon flour

1 x 400g packet fresh egg or tri-colour fettuccine
olive oil, to drizzle

2 smoked chicken breasts, cut in 1cm cubes

Instructions

1. Heat oil in a frying pan. Gently fry onion and garlic. Add bacon. Cook for 2 minutes. Add mushrooms. Cook for 2 more minutes.

2. Add basil, rosemary, evaporated milk and flour to pan mixture. Bring to a light boil, stirring regularly, so it doesn’t stick to pan. Allow to simmer until it thickens.

3. Cook fettuccine following packet directions. Drain. Drizzle with a little olive oil and set aside.

4. Add smoked chicken to pan. Cook for 1-2 minutes. Add cooked fettuccine to coat in creamy mixture. Cook for about 1 minute until food is heated through.

2012-06-13 by wrm Foooooood Geek 2

RIP Ray Bradbury

Not safe for work or kids. Unless they already know the One Word which is the Nine Part of Speech.*

* Ours do. I have managed to escape the blame for this. So far.

2012-06-06 by wrm Geek 1

I haz a sad.

I miss my* crazy cat.

But he just got impossible to live with.

I won’t miss his peeing on everything or his crazy noises at all times.

But my lap is empty and cold.

* Tanya rescued him. It should have been her cat. But in the end we both got banished to the garage, so he became “my” cat. OK, he also sat on my lap and hardly ever tried to chew my face off, we had an understanding like that.

2012-05-29 by wrm House 0

Seriously?

It’s not as sinister as it looks. Dealer sorted out the problem in one day.

But I thought it might cue discussions of the “Now we know why people don’t talk about Glocks giving trouble” type.

2012-05-28 by wrm Farting around Geek Guns 0

A rainy Sunday…

Spent sorting bullets.

Over 60 kilograms of .434 bullets…

Being sorted by weight.

It’s going to take a while, there are more than 3 700 bullets there…

2012-05-20 by wrm Guns 1

Arena

Sometimes I manage to impress myself bigtime.

A while ago, I left a comment on Jimmy’s page on Robot War, about Arena, which is basically* Robot War for the PC. This morning I received an email from Core War fundi John Metcalf, saying that he’s never heard of Arena, and would like to know more.

So I thought about it for about half a cup of coffee, remembered which box it was most likely to be, retrieved the box from behind the Puma, and the disk I was looking for was about the tenth disk down (this was the lucky bit — there are about 200 disks in there I guess).

The key point here is that I last used these disks on my father’s PC (the one before the one before the one he has now — it was a 386 on one of those motherboards that still took a 287 coprocessor) back in the early nineties. Call it twenty years plus tax.

The fact that I can’t find a notebook battery that I had in my hand day before yesterday is not relevant to the story.

So then I had to fire up the third machine on my desktop**, click the KVM over, and copy the files to something my main machine can read.

Now I know for a fact that the vast majority of my readers (both of them) are suffering MEGO with a side of TMI. So here’s a cut line for you. It gets geeky on the other side.

* Bad pun. Should be assemblerly. You don’t get it. Don’t worry. I’ll explain it.

** Primary machine is a Windoze 2K box. #2 is my Linux box, and #3 is a 486 (or maybe an early Pentium) which mostly boots DOS (with Windows 3.1 if I really need to do that) and runs my Expro.

(no, those were footnotes. And only a bit geeky. Here’s the cutline)

2012-04-19 by wrm Computers Geek 2