Tea Leaves

The middle of March means that March Madness is upon us. Therefore I’m going to talk to you about a film that is about the NBA. This might seem strange to you. But it makes sense to me. With the exception of a few years following Duke after I was at the school when they repeated in 1992, I’ve never been much for NCAA Basketball. As a singular event full of spectacle and drama, there isn’t much that can beat the NCAA tournament. But that doesn’t mean the basketball is that good. People will call me nuts, but what bothers me about the college game is that, well, the players are not that good yet.

A while ago I was holding forth, as I often do, cursing some local restaurant that made a crappy “caesar salad” that had no anchovies. Caesar salads, I opined, are meant to have anchovies, and any place that didn’t have them in their salad sucked.

A friend of mine politely informed me that I was wrong, and that the traditional Caesar in fact had no anchovies. I laughed in his face, and then snuck away to look it up, and discovered that he was right and I was wrong. Damn it to hell.

Pity the poor PC gamer. There he sits at his computer desk waiting for those AAA titles to come to his “platform of choice” a few months after they ship on the crippled consoles. Then, when the object of his desire is finally made available, the publisher encumbers it with what is an undeniably stupid system for “protecting” the digital content therein. I speak, of course, of the recent firestorm that Ubisoft has caused with their new DRM scheme on Assassin’s Creed 2 and other titles.

I have mixed feelings about this whole fiasco. On the one hand, I don’t really understand what Ubi hoped to achieve here. Requiring a game to be played online while giving the player no real reason to want to play the game online is kind of stupid. On the other hand, I can’t help but think that you don’t have to work too hard to find reasons not to play Assassin’s Creed.

This one is easy. Basically we’re going to do this recipe for pork stew except with lamb shoulder instead of pork, a bit of extra potatoes and parsnips, and just a plain set of herbs instead of chili peppers. That’s all you really need to know, but here’s the rest anyway.

In my lifetime I have spent my time using three software platforms that actually mattered in the outside world. The first was Berkeley Unix on a Vax in college (yeah yeah, you might not think this matters, but without BSD there is no Linux and more importantly, no Mach and no modern MacOS). The second was Windows. The third was, and continues to be MacOS X. I’ve also used Linux but in user land it’s similar enough to other Unix to not really matter to me as its own platform.

Occasionally one finds oneself needing to migrate between major platforms. I’ve had a lot of friends who had to go from using Unix in graduate school to Windows in the real world, for example. My advice to them was always simple: make a clean break. Don’t use emulation environments like Cygnus. The reason is simple: there is nothing worse than an emulator that almost works.

While peterb wallows in his extended winter-induced MMO haze, I’ve been stuck on the console. I have the following four thoughts on my recent experiences.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have also tried out the now aged and decrepit MMO Lord of The Rings Online (simply “LOTRO”, for short).

Today a soup that I discovered accidentally. It’s influenced by a lot of Chinese and Japanese style soups that I have consumed over the years, but I can’t claim that it actually has any real authentic connection to those cuisines. I threw this together one night in a miracle after a late day at work. So here we go.

Fear not, gentle readers. Although the curséd groundhog has predicted six more weeks of winter, and although the frightful weather seems to bear him out, I can promise you that Spring is just around the corner. How do I know this? Because this was the week that I decided to switch back to playing Xbox 360 games on the couch instead of Windows games on the desktop PC.

Today, a good all purpose side dish that’s stupidly easy. This is my lame version of roasted brussels sprouts, in which I have tried and failed to duplicate what they do at Legume. Mine are good, but not quite that good. I’ll even do a vegetarian version in addition to the one with bacon.