The Backstory: In 2010, I have set a goal for myself to experience one new thing per week, every week of the year. Each week, I try something I’ve never done before, and then I document my experience here, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. Read more here.
Week: 29
The Challenge/New Experience: Create a portable application suite for USB thumb drive.
Hello again, Dear Reader. You know, one of the things that I strive for with this year-long challenge, tangentially, is not to have too many similar tasks in a row. I have a lot of “crafty” items on my list, a lot of cooking items, a lot of computer geeky items. I just did a computer geeky one last week, so it wasn’t my intention to do another this week, is my point.
But, I did anyway. I have plans for a pretty cool New Thing coming up in another week or so (something that needs to be done when I have a TON of free time and the right frame of mind), so I’ve been knocking out some smaller “filler” items while I try to arrange scheduling for the bigger one.
Anyway. Let’s talk about Week #30 — portable applications. A portable application is a smaller, scaled-down version of a software program that you can run directly off a USB drive. Couple of advantages to this:
A portable application doesn’t make any changes to your registry or your hard drive, and uses up less of your PC’s resources to run.
Helpful if you’re working on a computer where you’re not allowed to install your own software, like a work computer.
Really really helpful if you’re troubleshooting problems on a friend or relative’s computer, which is so jacked up it won’t even allow you to download or install antispyware programs.
The Backstory: In 2010, I have set a goal for myself to experience one new thing per week, every week of the year. Each week, I try something I’ve never done before, and then I document my experience here, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. Read more here.
Week: 29
The Challenge/New Experience: Install a virtual PC using VirtualBox.
Ah, another technology challenge. The big trend in IT these days is virtualization. What’s that? You say you don’t follow the big IT trends? Well, I kind of have to, what with my job and everything. I am only just starting to understand this concept myself, so I’ll try to break it down into manageable morsels for you, Dear Reader.
VirtualBox is an application that lets you install another computer on your computer. It’s similar to Week 6′s Mac-on-a-Stick challenge, only it’s a lot more full-featured. Why would you want another computer installed on your computer, you ask? Well, you might not. But maybe you want to try out a Linux operating system like Ubuntu, but you don’t want to mess up your hard drive. Maybe you’re on a Mac, but you have a couple of Windows games that you like playing. Or maybe you’re on Windows 7 but you’ve got this awesome old program that only runs on XP.
Ideally, I wanted to install a virtual Windows computer on my netbook, which runs Ubuntu operating system. My netbook is a little short of RAM, though, so although I tried this, the results were less than stellar. For the purposes of documentation, I went the other way and installed a virtual Ubuntu machine on my Windows Vista laptop.
A few more notes and a brief demo video after the jump.
For the two or three of you who maybe didn’t hear about it on Facebook or Twitter this week — the population here in Stennieville has decreased by a factor of one. My sweet neurotic looney scaredy-cat Boo, who has been slowly deteriorating since his little medical emergency back in late March, finally reached a point where he just wasn’t going to get any better. So on Tuesday I had to do the hardest thing a pet owner ever has to do, and take him in for his Final Visit to the vet.
I was going to write a big long tribute to him, but I’m not really up for it. I will leave you with a few pictures, though.
Boo never liked cameras, and as a result, I don’t have a whole lot of pictures of him, and most of them look like this:
… because he was always turning his head away from the flash. But once in a while, if I turned the flash off, I was able to get his good side:
He was a good kitty, even for all his bizarre neurotic faults, and he was here for far too short a time. And in his whole life, the only thing he ever wanted was to be good friends with Buster, who hated him. So here is a final picture of my contented cat in a rare moment where Buster showed him a little charity:
Or he was just too sleepy to notice Boo was there.
The Backstory: In 2010, I have set a goal for myself to experience one new thing per week, every week of the year. Each week, I try something I’ve never done before, and then I document my experience here, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. Read more here.
Week: 28
The Challenge/New Experience: Help my friend Kelly install her new car stereo.
This week’s New Thing came to me by way of an e-mail from my good buddy Kelly (with a Y) last Friday — a win-win situation for both of us. She had a new car stereo that needed installing; I had a weekend coming up and no idea what my New Thing of the week would be. Those thieves at Best Buy wanted $50 for installation — highway robbery! Let’s do it! Sisters workin’ it out for themselves!
How hard could it be?
To be fair to both of us, neither Kelly nor I went into this blindly. We did our due diligence, or our due Googling at least. I found some GREAT step-by-step instructions that turned out to be for a different car entirely (but I swear it’s got her make and model number on there!), which recommended that we essentially take the entire car apart.
My point, though, is that we knew this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, and we both went into it with a feeling that this was going to be a difficult task, but we were going to emerge from it triumphantly, as better people, with a great feeling of accomplishment.
The Backstory: In 2010, I have set a goal for myself to experience one new thing per week, every week of the year. Each week, I try something I’ve never done before, and then I document my experience here, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. Read more here.
Week: 27
The Challenge/New Experience: Learn a song on the ukulele
Greetings and salutations, Dear Reader, and welcome to Week #27 of the 2010 Challenge! Past the halfway mark now, it’s all downhill from here. This week I have assigned myself a musical challenge.
About four or five years ago, I bought myself a ukulele (a word which, incidentally, I just learned to spell this week — I have been spelling it “ukelele” all this time). Not a toy ukulele, either, but the real deal; I bought it from Musiciansfriend.com. I don’t recall now why I forked out the dough for it, but I remember that I really, really wanted one. At the time, I was playing guitar pretty regularly — meeting up with Scotty Dude on Friday nights to jam, practicing each day, etc. I guess I thought a ukulele would round me out as a musician. Instead, I plunked at it a little bit for the first couple of weeks, then stuck it back inside its little gig bag and put it away in a closet, where it has been gathering dust for nigh these many years.
When I set out on this project this year, I thought about “things I haven’t gotten around to yet,” and ukulele was up there on the list. I kept seeing it in my closet and thinking, “I really should learn to play a song or two on that thing.” So this was the week. One thing I probably did wrong last time was that I tried to use the guitar chords I already had lying around and apply my (slim) guitar knowledge to the uke. This time I purposely sought out uke websites, looking for chords and tab written out specifically for uke. I can tell you this definitively — the best ukulele website out there is Ukulele Hunt — tons of chords, videos, articles, how-to’s, a regularly updated blog. I love this site. I’d bookmark it a million times if I could.
My long-term goal on the ukulele is to be as good as this five-year-old Japanse boy:
Barring that, I would like to at least get that much joy out of playing. Here’s a couple more clips of him: “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and here he is just riffing. I don’t want children, but if I did, I would want this one.
Oddly enough, even though I found dozens of chords for songs specifically for ukulele, the song that I specifically wanted to play couldn’t be found, so I found them for guitar instead. I did find a lot of useful struming techniques which I am still attempting to master.
I do not have video this week. I was going to make a lame excuse about the camera being low on batteries, but the truth is, the anxiety of appearing on camera added to the anxiety of actually trying to perform and sing at the same time was too much. Here is an audio clip, however, of me attempting to bang out “A Little Respect” by Erasure.
Caveat: my ukulele, a Lanikai LU-21 (rated very highly as a good beginner uke on Ukulelehunt.com, incidentally) is a nice little instrument, but needs to be restrung and the intonation is a little off. You will hear this most prominently when I do an Em chord (“oh baby refrain”) — it will sound very off-tune. I apologize for hurting your ears. Sorry also for the tinny recording — this was done on my little cheap-o digital recorder.
The Backstory: In 2010, I have set a goal for myself to experience one new thing per week, every week of the year. Each week, I try something I’ve never done before, and then I document my experience here, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. Read more here.
Week: 26
The Challenge/New Experience: Attend a City Council meeting.
I’m a little late with filing my report this week, Dear Reader, so my apologies to you for that. This week on Tuesday night I attended a Burbank City Council meeting. I think this one will have to go into my book with a star next to it, though, because I didn’t make it through the whole thing.
How many of you have ever attended a local government meeting? I’ll tell you what my biggest surprise was — the Burbank City Council meetings, or at least the one I attended, lasts about five hours. I really thought it was going to be closer to two hours, maybe three if there was a lively agenda.
My documentation is a little sketchy this week also. I didn’t want to be snapping pictures during the meeting, of course. I wanted to record a little audio but the batteries in my digital recorder were dead. They are always dead when I need them.
However, here is a photo of the Burbank City Hall building, taken from their Wikipedia entry:
Also, here is the agenda from this week’s meeting. And! If you’re really ambitious, here is archived video of the meeting I attended. It’s five hours and 38 minutes long, but hey, this is a long weekend, right? What else have you got to do? For some reason it starts with a couple of lite FM numbers, but the meeting is eventually on there.
So, I got there a little before 6pm to attend the meeting, only to find they had an awards ceremony that evening and the regular council meeting wouldn’t start until 6:30. Not a big deal. A little after 6:30, the meeting began. The boring details are after the jump, keep reading if you dare.
The Backstory: In 2010, I have set a goal for myself to experience one new thing per week, every week of the year. Each week, I try something I’ve never done before, and then I document my experience here, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. Read more here.
Week: 25
The Challenge/New Experience: Make Eggs Benedict.
Well, no rest for the wicked, Dear Reader — a new week is here, which means a new Challenge is here with it. Since last week’s New Thing took several days (very nearly the whole week, in fact), I decided it was okay to pick an easy one this week — yes, it’s time for another cooking challenge!
Eggs Benedict is my favorite breakfast, but I’ve never had it at home before, just in restaurants. I’m no stranger to poached eggs, however, or frying up a bit of ham, so the only uncharted territory here was the Hollandaise sauce. I know you can get a mix, but since that was the only challenging thing I decided to go ahead and make it from scratch, with a recipe from AllRecipes.com.
Incidentally, in a recent episode of Good Eats that I saw on the Food Network last week, Alton Brown made Eggs Benedict also, and he even made the English muffins from scratch. I am not that ambitious yet.
Just a few pictures for you this time, because I had all four burners going in the kitchen and it was tough to keep up with everything cooking and take pictures at the same time.
Basic ingredients: Eggs, Canadian bacon, English muffins
This is a nice international meal — the muffins are English, the bacon is Canadian, the sauce is French in orign but named for Holland.
All four burners going at once!
There’s some weird spot on that picture, looks like some weird orange blob in with the poached eggs. I don’t know what that is, it’s some flash from the camera or something, because whatever that thing is, it wasn’t in my eggs. I don’t have a double boiler, so as you can see I’m doing the Hollandaise in a metal bowl over a pot of simmering water.
Who's hungry?
Here’s breakfast — in addition to the Eggs Benedict, I have some fried red potatoes. I would love to share this with you, Dear Reader, but as you can see:
All gone.
There was nothing left — I am a member of the Clean Plate Club today. Yum!
So, when last I left you, Dear Reader, you were hanging by a thread wondering what was wrong with the cigar box guitar. It certainly looked fine, and it was nearly playable, and I suppose I could have stopped there. But it would have been half-assed, and even though half-assed is often good enough for me, in this case it wasn’t. I wanted a real playable instrument.
Here were the problems as of Sunday night:
The action (which is how high the strings are off the neck) was way too high, rendering it very difficult to play.
The strings would not stay in tune. I quickly discovered that this was because the tension from the strings was pulling the bridge loose. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of this.
The electrics weren’t working. I bought some parts from Radio Shack and attempted to follow the directions for installing them, but when I plugged it into my amp, I just got a lot of feedback and no actual sound from the strings.
