Today I Learned...

Well today I learned a few things. The first thing I learned was that vitamin c does not actually prevent colds. It decreases the length of the infection but does little to nothing to prevent you from actually catching the cold in the first place. Instead zinc actually helps to prevent them.

The other thing I learned was that astronomers need to come up with a better definition of what an asteroid is. As of right now there are objects that are dual classed as asteroid/comet, asteroid/moon, and asteroid/dwarf planet. This I learned when trying to find the difference between a comet and asteroid. The definition of asteroid makes no distinction between the two. It is only when you look at comets that you find that a comet has a tail made up of melting ice whereas an asteroid does not. However all comets will eventually become asteroids as the ice melts away and the tail disappears. This calls into question why there are objects that are dual classified as both.

Inevitable

Listen GOP. I myself am a registered member of your party. So you should know now that what I am about to say does not come from some bleeding hearted liberal. You, and by you I mean all the narrow minded church going bigots out there, have lost. You have lost touch with what this country wants, you have lost touch with things that are occurring in this country. Instead of addressing these issues you continue to fight a losing battle opposing gay-marriage. Americans will no longer tolerate flagrant discrimination in our laws. Fighting against equal marriage from state to state is a waste of resources, with each case that is set aside pending appeals you push the supreme court closer and closer to being forced into ruling that all states must allow it. That day is coming, whether it comes in the next year or the year after that. There is no stopping it at this point.

Instead of fighting this losing battle you should be devoting yourselves to reaching young people. More and more are beginning to see the party as a pack of old fools desperately clinging to the past.

Steam (app already running)

I don't know why but I had the sudden urge to play Titan Quest earlier today. I played it in the past when it was released and really enjoyed it, so much infact when it was released on Steam as the Gold Edition I bought another copy so I didn't need to worry about the disc disappearing on me or something.

Steam's installation of the game is rather stupid. First you need to download the base game and run it. Failing to do this can result in errors when trying to run the expansion. Now this wouldn't be so bad, except then you need to download the full game a second time in addition to the expansion. Altogether it tops out at about 6 gigs.

Now originally I didn't know about the errors encountered when you don't run the base game so I downloaded both at the same time. When I try to run the expansion I get the message "Steam not found" and my internet browser opens up the steam download page.

I close that, make sure theres no Titan Quest executables running and then try to run the base game thinking maybe I needed to run the base game first. However I get the message "(app already running)"

Googling reveals that its a known issue with Titan Quest, though there aren't many posts on it, and directs to a page with solutions. So off I go to redownload the game, another 6 gigs. None of the solutions worked. I emailed Steam about it hoping they would have more ideas.

I get back an email suggesting that I run Steam as administrator, doesn't work. I email them back and get some BS apology and one final solution of reinstalling steam.

I go and do this and the uninstallation freezes, or so I think. Apparently the reinstall first uninstalled every game i had installed, all 700 gigs of games, uninstalled. Now Steam gave me no heads up about this happening, neither in the email or in the application.

So now here I am, downloading all the games again at 900 kb/s. The good news in all this is that Titan Quest runs.

Breaking Bad

[SPOILERS]

I just finished watching the series. I dont really know how to feel about the ending though. Yes Walter had to die and I'm glad they didn't try to save him. I am happy that he found a way to pass on the remainder of him money to his son (I noticed that he gave all his money to his son and nothing to his daughter, asshole) but at the same I really wish that his wife had not been exonerated and had gone to prison for either money laundering or the assault on Ted.

My favorite character was always Jesse and it was nice that he lived in the end, though how long he would have stayed free after escaping is another story entirely. He would have been wanted by the DEA and there would be a massive manhunt out for him. His fingerprints would be all over the place at the White Power gang's lab/club. Presuming Saul is right and you only get one chance with the Vacuum guy he would have to do it on his own. Jesse really doesn't strike me as the type of guy who could do that.

It is a shame Hank died, but I understand that it was required in order to set his family firmly against him. He went out in a way that fit in well with the character, Hank always struck me as the type of guy who wouldn't beg for his life and in the end he didn't. Though I'm sure even if he had it wouldn't have done any good.

Its a shame the series only lasted 5 years. Really though 5 seasons to represent 2 years in the show was beginning to... show. When Walter called the school in the final season to talk to his son, the students looked more like college students than high schoolers. Which is understandable considering they would have used extras the same age as Walter Jr so the difference wasn't as apparent. Not to mention the whole Cancer thing of course.

I have read in numerous places that are making a spinoff centering around Saul Goodman called 'Better Call Saul'. The character was a good supporting role but I honestly don't have enough interest in him to see why they are making a show for him. I much rather see a show centering around Jesse's life after his escape. It could focus on him coming to terms with the death of his ex-girlfriend and either his life on the run or trying to fit into society.

In the end the show was quite good and I can see why its been rated so highly. Its not my favorite show to end recently, that honor goes to Dexter, but its definitely something I intend to keep around for awhile.

Steak

I don't know why it is that all of my best steaks have come from when Geno is out of town. They aren't too bad when hes here, but for some reason when he goes out of town I manage to get the cook times down perfectly.

I like my steak Rare - Medium Rare. I can eat Medium as well. Anything more than that though isn't worth digesting. I tend to go by site, and my guidlines are thus

Perfect Steak:
Hot & Red on the inside, Black on the outside.

Good Steak:
Hot & Red on the Inside

Acceptable Steak:
Warm & Red on the inside
Pink on the inside

Bad Steak:
Purple on the Inside (this can still be salvaged in some cases by popping it back on the heat)
Brown on the Inside (cooked too long)

Worst Steak:
Grey on the inside

It is very difficult, if not near impossible to get a pan-fried steak perfect and I have only managed to do it once. Most of my steaks fall into the acceptable range and I get more bad steaks than good ones. I think a lot of this has to do with the cut I cook. I prefer to cook a thick cut steak, gives it more time for the outside to get that dark crisp crust while the inside cooks.

My main method of cooking isn't the best, I know that its better to cook a steak on medium than on high, however for some reason every time I have tried medium heat it either comes out Brown or Purple.

What I do is:
Salt Steak on both sides 40 minutes in advance, leave out to bring to room temperature
Wipe thin layer of oil on Cast Iron Pan
Heat pan on high until it starts to smoke
Place Steak in middle of pan
Depending on thickness I will flip anywhere between 1 minute and 2 minutes
Once flipped I bring the heat down to medium to cook the other side
After 1-2 minutes I flip the steak again and put a lid on the pan.
If I had been flipping every minute, I cook with the lid on for 30 seconds, if 2 minutes I cook for 60 seconds.
If I see red on the sides of the steak I flip and repeat the lid.
Once thats done I pull the Steak out of the pan and put on plate.
I then fry mushrooms and onions in the pans juices.
When these are done I put them either on the plate or in a bowl and pour whatever remaining juices are left onto the steak.

When time is gaged correctly this steak will be hot and red.

To end this I just want to say something to everyone who thinks Steak is just a hunk of meat and because they have tried a certain cut they aren't going to like it. The cut of the steak makes a HUGE difference. If you think its too tough, its probably because you have had a bad cut. Sirloin is about average and if your not a meat eater I wouldn't recommend it. Instead I would go for something more tender like a filet, rib steak (prime rib, scotch filet, or rib eye), or T-bone/Porterhouse. Yes most of these are more expensive, but they are like night and day when compared to your typical rump steak.

PANIC!!!

I couldn't just leave it alone...
Let me start from the beginning.

I have been wanting to install CyanogenMod on my Nexus 10 for awhile. It seemed simple enough, I already had Clockworks Recovery mod installed from when I rooted the device. Instructions all read and all I had to do was flash the ROM. Well here's the tricky thing. Even though I have the latest version of CWM when I went to flash the ROM it gives me a status 7 error and doesn't really inform me what that is. A little googling reveals that it is some sort of verification error and all I have to do is modify a couple files on the ROM zip.

I restart my nexus and this is where the trouble really starts. Its stuck in a recovery loop. Every time I try to reboot the device it boots up CWM.
Bootloader is saying "Reboot Mode Flag: Recovery" so I figure that's what's doing it, all I need to do is change that back to none or normal and it will boot fine. Well apparently there is no simple way to change that flag for the nexus 10 that I could find on the internet. There were plenty of people giving solutions for nexus7 and the s3, but none for my tablet.

To make matters worse, I can't access the tablet through USB on computer. This is when I start to panic and yell at myself. After 10 minutes of that (without touching device, I know not to do anything while panicking) I recall that the nexus root toolkit boots directly into cwm, so there must be a way for it to reset the flag once its done doing whatever it is it does. I connect the nexus to the computer once again and the program is detecting it. I run a couple access tests on it which all return with positive results. During the second test I notice that the bootloader flag is back to none. Yay problem fixed, nope.

The nexus boots up and I get the nexus loading screen with 4 circles, and then black. Reboots back to cwm. At this point I'm thinking the operating system must have got corrupted when it gave me a status 7 error, even though I can find no other examples of this on the internet. I mean status 7 is a verification check before it actually does anything. One more thing I am comfortable trying, and that's a full factory reset. I restart into bootloader and start up nexus root toolkit again. I next run the flash stock + unroot tool and it does its thing.

5 minutes later I am running a fully wiped unrooted locked nexus with stock 4.4.2 AOSP. I quickly unlock and root the device, then install twrp. Within 5 minutes I am running cyanogenmod. So what'd I do wrong? Well. Nothing. Apparently theres a fault in CWM that occasionally ROMs fail the verification check for no reason, and there's another fault that CWM can occasionally get caught in a recovery bootloop. My bad luck to have got them both at the same time.

Now I need to mention that they say they have fixed these problems in the latest version of the mod. THEY HAVE NOT as I was using the latest version downloaded through their own manager. If you need custom recovery, use twrp instead.