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.

Raglan Beach

Ah yes, its winter up north isn't it? I know nothing warms the heart quite like summer beach scenes from down under. However we don't live in Australia, so you'll just have to make do with one from New Zealand.

This would be the entrance to Whaingaroa Harbour (aka. Raglan Harbour) in Raglan New Zealand. Off to the left of the picture is the Tasman Sea. The Tasman Sea is the section of the Pacific that separates Australia and New Zealand.

Raglan, New Zealand is quickly becoming known as the best towns for surfing in New Zealand. There are 3 bays within a kilometer that are highly rated and because of the towns location, it rarely becomes crowded. The only people who visit the beach are locals and people from nearby Hamilton that don't want to drive an extra hour to hit the beaches on the Bay of Plenty.

If you're not into surfing or playing in the waves, you can swim in the much calmer harbour that surrounds the town.

Microtransactions

Okay, I knew that the android was full of apps that were rife with microtransactions. I knew a lot of these freemium games started easy and then grossly inflated the difficulty so you had to follow a set strategy or pay mad money to buy powerups. I knew this when I bought a tablet. What I didn't expect was just how much they try to cheat you.

I have Plants vs Zombies on PC. It was my first experience with the game but I knew there was a mobile version as well. Today I purchased PvZ for my tablet. This is NOT a freemium game. I bought it outright for money, yet the first thing that happens upon loading is an ad for some other popcap game. I don't want ads in the games I buy, maybe in the free games, but its unacceptable to have an ad in a purchased game.

Still, its  great game and aside from that annoying ad at the main menu it seems to be a complete game. Feeling like they can be forgiven because it is a great game that I enjoy I decided to download PvZ2 and give it a try. I am so disappointed. It is the same game, except they expect you to use real money to purchase plants. Or so I thought, apparently most of the plants (which will set you back $5 each) and upgrades (which are over $10 each) can be unlocked in the game just by playing through it. Nowhere is this mentioned. Most, if not all, of these plants are from the previous game. Half way in through the first world (which outs me around 20% into the game) and I have yet to see anything new apart from skins, and a superpower that is to be used when things get too difficult (aka when they artificially ramp up the difficult to make it impossible to play without spending money.)

I'll continue to play as long as I can without spending anything and report back when I reach the limit or beat the game.

Games Id like to play

Now that I have a PSP with custom firmware I am given the opportunity to play a lot of games that I have missed over the years. I have always been of the mindset that emulators play best on mobile systems. God knows that I have everything from a NES emulator to a PSP emulator (don't know why) on my nexus 10. One of the great things I have discovered about emulation is that there are a lot of games out there not released in English that have fan translations.

Here's a list of the games I am planning to play this year...

Final Fantasy I - XII : The first Final Fantasy game I played was VII, I never completed it. In fact there have only been 3 Final Fantasy games that I have completed, 8, 10, and 10-2. I am planning to start from the beginning and play through the series up through 12, I also have plenty of FF games on other consoles that I want to play.

Lunar Silver Star Harmony : A game I have wanted to play ever since 1992 and it was released on Sega CD. I have no idea why in 20+ years I have not played this.

Star Ocean First Departure & Second Evolution : This is another of the series that I have never got around to playing. No excuses, There's just always been something else I wanted to play more.

Armored Core 3 Portable & Expansions : I played Armored Core 3 a ton on the PS2. It was one of my favorite ps2 games. I never even heard that there were more expansions after Silent Line, and I want to play them.

.Hack series : .Hack/Root is probably my all time favorite anime. The games however were Never available for purchase in any of the local game stores. Now to buy then costs nearly a fortune.

Generation of Chaos series : Honestly I played quite a bit of the first PSP game. I didn't finish it, but now I find out there are 2 more games in the series. I want to play them.

All the rest : There are far too many games I want to play to list them all. Suffice it to say there are games from just about every major device since NES that I wish to play, the majority of which are RPGs.

Changing Music Tastes

Lately I have been listening to a lot of jazz, classical, and game OSTs (Original Sound Track, music that is written specifically for something) and I have noticed that I am playing music through my headset but often at the beginning of songs I am unsure if it is coming from the TV or my headset. I don't think this is a problem with my ears, but rather that the music I have begun to enjoy the most is stuff that is quiet.

I used to be a big fan of metal, hard rock, and techno. Now I find that most metal and techno songs will give me a headache. I'm still a rock fan for the most part, but I've started to appreciate the alternative style which isn't loud more and more. I know peoples tastes in music change as they get older, I always a thought that mine would change into something more modern as I have always liked older stuff. Instead I find the majority of music I listen to are by people who have been dead for decades if not centuries.

Sure there is a lot of new stuff I like from active artists, but when I go and look for other things by them I am usually extremely disappointed.