Google+ = SUCK.

Dear Google+: here's the thing. I don't WANT you. I don't WANT social networking. I LIKE being un-networked socially.

Why am I yelling at you in public like this, ironically enough using your own platform (blogger)? Because people I don't know are adding me to their Google+ circles, then spamming me. And I can't block them without "joining" your goddamn service.

You fail.

p.s. Anyone know how I can block someone without joining? Please let me know!

Facebook, by Dinosaur Comics

I didn't find the comic today as incredible as usual, but the mouseover, above, was CLEARLY AWESOME.

Ubuntu, external USB hard drives, and .Trash:

And much frustration ensued.

Okay, it's like this. My computer has been giving me some trouble on bootup lately. Finding annoying disk errors that (maybe) aren't really there, not letting me try to fix them, etc. So I decided to do some work on it.

(in case anyone happened upon this through searching the webs and cares, I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx; and the external hard drive pre-dates my generally very happy switch to Ubuntu, so it was initially used on a windows XP machine.)

Before starting said "work" I decided to do the smart thing and back up my important files to an external hard drive. Smart, no?

So first I went through the external USB hard drive (320gb), which had all manner of shit on it from many years of use, much of it redundant backups (like, say, "Acer laptop backup Nov 09", "Acer Laptop Backup June 10" and "important files from Acer laptop Dec 10", which a bunch of repetition) and started trashing things. Then clicked "Empty Trash". Presto!

Except ubuntu does this clever thing where it doesn't actually let you delete the files completely: it saves them in a folder called .Trash-1000. So something like /media/ExternalVolumeName/.Trash.1000.

This will give your dumb ass a second chance if you accidentally deleted something, then emptied the trash, and then changed your mind. Great, right? Sorta not, since it means that you don't recover the disk space.

So I kept trying to delete these nasty files. And somehow, somewhere deep in a dark hole, it created some sort of circular/redundant result, and kept trying to move the files to the trash. See this screen shot?


Remember that this is from a 320GB external hard drive, and it's the only other drive mounted on my desktop computer (which also happens to have a 320 GB hard drive, and no other storage.) So obviously, something is wrong when it's preparing to delete 1.7 terrabytes.

I finally got pissed off this morning and went with the nuclear option: since I'd already backed up the important files from the external drive, I fired up Disk Utility and reformatted the damn thing. And lived happily ever after. I think. Now I'm about to do a fresh new backup of files back to the external drive, so I can go back to the original problem. So we'll see if another followup blog post tells more tales of woe.

food porn, SPECIAL EDITION: VINTAGE!

Going through an external hard drive, and came across some cool VINTAGE food porn! Yay!

This is a bigass pan of potatoes, tofu, peppers, and ONIONS that I made for a camping trip that my brother S and his son D and I did in Alaska in summer 2008. It was delicious. Bears visited the cabin next to Eklutna Lake. I fell and got hurt riding my bike back to the car with the kid trailer for more firewood. I got towed by a guy on his four wheeler, got the firewood, rode back the approximately 2 miles, bleeding heavily, and S did excellent brother care: he found the vodka.


Here's a closeup of the potatoes, tofu, onions, and peppers. It was good stuff.

This is our grill in Anchorage with tofu steaks and seitan steaks. Yum.

This is that dinner, plated, with vegan creamed spinach and sauteed mushrooms.


This is a delicious fried tofu hot salad, with careful presentation. I have absolutely no idea when it's from.

Broadway bike time lapse

This video almost made me a little seasick, but it's still pretty cool: a time lapse from a helmet cam of a person riding all 13 miles of Broadway, south from the Bronx to lower Manhattan.

Vegan hotel room food porn

I know, y'all just can't get enough of this shit, can you?

The hotel is quite nice, especially with a jacuzzi and wonderful heated indoor pool. I love having tons of hotel points.

(UPDATE: I wish the camera on my phone didn't suck, since it's an awfully convenient way of mobile blogging. Sorry for the craptastic quality of a lot of the images.)

Vegan food porn, CNY Redux

Same as in  this post, this is the spicy tofu scramble at Strong Hearts Cafe in Syracuse. While the folks i'm working with have been great about accommodating my veganism, this was still a special treat this morning.

Back to ATL tomorrow, then J and I are presenting together (for the first time in years) in NYC on Tuesday about street medics. Pretty cool.

I'm a snot machine, but life is great.

Vegan Indian food: Syracuse!

The $9 lunch buffet at Samrat in Syracuse was AMAZING. The pickle was genuinely some of the best I've ever had. Wow. I stuffed myself at 2:30pm so extensively I couldn't even think of eating again yesterday.