I have been ridiculously busy recently, and so I decided to put my cooking snobbery aside and use some store-bought pasta sauce! The thing I really don’t like about it is that there are either no veggies or they have preserved veggies, which are not as good. Here’s the perfect compromise! I used Classico’s “Cabernet Marinara” when I made this, but I’ve also found Muir Glen makes a great marinara sauce.

Required Equipment:

• Cutting Board
• Knife
• Skillet
• Cooking Spoon

Ingredients:

• Mushrooms
• Yellow Bell Pepper
• Balsamic Vinegar
• Olive Oil
• Your favorite store-bought marinara sauce

Procedure:

• Set aside some of your pasta sauce in a small bowl on the counter so it stays at room temperature (don’t want it to be cold).
• Wash your mushrooms and remove the stems. Wash the yellow pepper and cut off the top and bottom. Strip the ‘ribs’ off the peppers as well… those don’t taste like anything.
• Dice the pepper into very small squares (about 1/4 inch).
• Cut the mushroom heads into small slivers and then cut those slivers crosswise until they are your preferred size.
• Heat the skillet until it is hot, then add barely enough oil to coat the pan (go easy on the oil).
• When the oil is hot, add your mushrooms and peppers slowly. They should sizzle but not burn.
• For a few minutes, periodically shove everything around in the pan with your spoon, and then shake the pan back and forth so that everything flattens out.
• Once the mushrooms are softened up and are turning a light brown, throw in some balsamic vinegar… enough so all of it can be soaked up by the mushrooms and peppers. Continue to shove everything around and shake the pan for another couple of minutes.
• Slowly add your sinful store-bought sauce to the pan, and stir it all together.
• Let the sauce simmer for a few minutes, stirring occasionally, and then it’s ready to serve!

The whole process should probably take under 20 minutes (under 10 if you’re quick with the knife), so if you’re serving pasta you can start to heat the water up before you start with the sauce, and the water will probably be boiling by the time the sauce is ready. Enjoy!

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while, so here is installment #1 of my “Life Lessons Learned from Go” series. I have honestly learned a few good strategies for life from learning to play Go, and I thought people would find it interesting. I swear I’m not being pretentious here, as pretentious as this may seem

Being wrong is something everyone hates to admit, whether it means admitting it to oneself or admitting it to others. One of the most important life skills I have learned from playing Go is the value of admitting when I have made a mistake and “cutting my losses” thereafter. It is quite obvious that on the game board, whatever opinion you may have of the condition of your stones has no effect on their actual condition. If you have placed a stone in a foolish manner, the other player can take advantage of that mistake. It is then up to you to decide either to refuse to acknowledge that your move was a mistake (and suffer the contingent consequences of your successive sub-optimal play) or to acknowledge that you messed up, there’s no going back, and making the best of the remaining situation by playing optimally.

The clearest example of this is oiotoshi: “connect and die.” A particular group of your stones (let’s call it group A) is currently in atari (one move from the opponent will remove them from the board), but you can connect them (with one move) to another group of your stones (group B) which is not in atari… however, once you have done so, the resulting group (both groups plus the connecting stone) will be in atari. This is the definition of oiotoshi. In this unfortunate case, it is plain to see that it is best for you not to connect the groups, because you will end up losing more stones than if you simply protect group B and allow your opponent to capture group A.

Oiotoshi is the most obvious situation in which cutting your losses is to your benefit. However, the more subtle situations are much easier to ignore and require more will power to address with honesty. For example, your shape needs to have sufficient space for two eyes in order to survive. If your opponent is closing in around your shape, which does not have any well-defined eyes yet, you can choose to push ahead, attempting to shrink your opponent’s territory, or you may ensure the survival of your group and focus on creating your eyes. This is not as obvious as oiotoshi because it is easy to say “oh, I’ll make two eyes somehow, when the time comes,” but as I’ve learned the hard way many times, your group may already be one move away from death! You must ensure that there really is a way for you to make two eyes before going ahead with your attack, otherwise your entire shape will die, and all those stones that your opponent put on the board defending your attack will serve to strengthen his territory walls. In most cases, when a large group of your stones is killed, you may as well resign.

The overall lesson learned from this: never be too arrogant to doubt yourself, because otherwise you may miss the truth. Once you realize the truth, and it turns out you messed up, you must face it and deal with it. You are usually better off admitting to yourself that you made a mistake than hoping your opponent will not notice it.
[edited 3/20]

After over two months since its completion, I have finally hung my latest painting, Go Fish, up on the wall. The reason it took so long is because it’s been freezing cold outside and I didn’t want to do the sanding/finishing work on the frame until it was warm enough to do it outdoors.

I also put up the web page devoted to it in my paintings page, so check it out! I took a whole bunch of photos documenting the painting process, so you should take a look if you’re curious.

It’s pretty funny how angry democrats get about people who vote republican. Do republicans ever get that angry at democrats? I think the reason is obvious: democrats are angry that republicans tend to restrict the rights of everyone, regardless of their political lean, whereas democrats are trying to make everyone more free (well, except for gun laws and such), thereby allowing conservative people to remain conservative. Gee, sounds fair to me.

Hi everyone. It appears as though the commenting feature is not working! I will try to fix that this weekend, sorry.

[Update]: I have isolated the problem and it looks like I can blame my web host for incorrectly configuring PHP. There is a feature in Wordpress which allows comment-poster’s IP addresses to be checked against a large blacklist of known spammer IP addresses and known “open proxy” servers. This feature relied on something that was not set correctly by my web host I believe, so I have contacted them in the hopes that they will fix it. In the meantime I turned off that spam-protection feature, so I’m expecting some spam. If spam comes in I will disable comments until the problem can be fixed.

[Update]: Two spams in less than an hour, so comments are turned off until I can get that problem fixed. Sorry!

[Update]: I decided to tolerate some spam and turn comments back on. I am currently arguing with my web host trying to get them to fix their configuration problem. Turns out PHP is fine, but their DNS-lookup is behaving in a strange and nonstandard way and it’s messing up Wordpress’ attempts to check commenters’ IP addresses against a spam blacklist.

EuroTrip was a movie that I think was supposed to be like Road Trip but not a direct sequel. I have to say I was skeptical of it because it didn’t look very funny from the commercials, but it was a good laugh. The movie may have been a bit too long, but at least there was some character development, which is not something that can be said for many movies like this. The acting was good enough, and it was nice to see actors who are probably about the age of the characters they’re supposed to be portraying (ahem… the O.C.?). There were some very funny moments and some moments that were supposed to be funny but just weren’t, and those moments were what made this movie less-than-great. “Painfully not funny” is a good way to describe them

EuroTrip was funny overall, but I’d recommend “Not Another Teen Movie” instead. I give EuroTrip 2 stars.

I just stumbled upon Microsoft’s official Internet Explorer weblog: IEBlog. I find it very amusing that each post appears to have been polished to a shine by at least one copy editor and then following each post is a collection of comments from the general public, all of which are negative or somehow anti-microsoft! I only looked at a handful of posts but I did not see one single reply by the author to any of the comments. Way to go, MS!

I just freaked out because I noticed a “partially dead” pixel on my new LCD!!!!!!!!

Anyway, I googled “dead pixel” and discovered that sometimes you can massage it back to life. I tried it and it worked! Holy Frijoles! I took a (lotion-free) tissue and rubbed around and over the pixel for about 30 seconds, during which it flickered a bunch of times. I then rubbed all around the edges of the screen, all over the place, and it is now working normally!

Give this a try if you suffer the same crisis. I suspect it’s good to act quickly but that’s really just a guess. I swear that this was pixel-perfect for the first three days I used it, so I was very shocked to see that happen.

I have been considering getting a new monitor for a long time, and I finally decided to ditch my behemoth 19″ flat-CRT and trade up for a 19″ LCD! I would actually be getting about 2″ more screen because of the limitations of CRT displays (only 18″ of glass, not able to accurately display the image all the way to the edges, etc) and it would take up a lot less desk space. Also, I was worried the monitor was going to snap my desk in half because it weighs 52 pounds! This new one weighs 16 pounds. Ironically, the old monitor measured 24″ diagonally from one corner of the bezel to the other. This new one measures 21″! It’s got a smaller face but a larger screen. Hilarious.

In an attempt to justify the particular model I purchased, I would mention to people half-heartedly that it could rotate 90 degrees for a portrait-format display. However, I had no intention of really using that feature because I didn’t really see the point. Today I decided to install that pivot software and try it out. Take a look at the monitor as it normally is here, and then take a look at portrait mode here! Holy shit! Pivot is the greatest thing ever! I find it really funny that everyone seems to be stressing wide-screen as the cool new feature, but portrait is far more useful. Think about all the vertical scrolling you do when you browse the web… portrait mode extends your vertical viewing area from 1024 to 1280, which is 25% more room and 25% less scrolling! Obviously this comes at the cost of losing 25% of your horizontal space, but web sites are designed to support at least 800-wide screens, so you will never miss anything with 1024-wide.

Isn’t it funny how monitors are all horizontally oriented, but paper and books are vertically oriented? I assume movies and TV are horizontal because it more closely resembles the wide-format view of the world we see from our eyes, but from what I’ve heard, written words are best consumed in a narrow column format like that in a book or newspaper.