A haiku

Warm summer evening.
Wish I had can of Cel-Ray.
Supermarket, call!

Restaurants, food, and the person who makes it

Profoundly disappointed to see that "Stover Bros. Cafe", a restaurant-within-a-store no longer appears to carry the "Southern Fried Donut", a delicious concoction which was a bit like a funnel cake, only a million times better. That got me thinking...when people miss a restaurant, what do they really miss? The décor, the service, or the food? Say you've got a restaurant, a favorite restaurant. One day it burns down and the waitstaff decides to open in a different location with a new name. Perhaps it's a little more or less downscale. But the menu is almost identical, and it's the same guy doing the cooking, so no loss, right?

It's not the same, is it? I mean, the local Maggie Moo's was kicked out of its strip center, and it reopened as "Harolds" elsewhere. The location is a bit smaller, it no longer carries the name, and it serves hot dogs as well, but the ice cream is the same. However, it's very different. Or the Stover Bros. example: it used to be this redneck-ish gas station burger place, now it's all "upscale" and stuff, but it's the same guy working there. I believe the donut was originally named something else. As for a fictional example: in the movie Ratatouille, the old Gaston's restaurant was shut down by the health department, so the main characters create a new restaurant, which served the exact same food (much to the evil food critic-turned- good "small business investor"'s delight).

It also depends on the way you cook it, something unique to an individual. Even if you had an exact recipe (not a clone that someone hypothesized) of, say, Coca-Cola, or Colonel Sander's herbs and spices, it wouldn't taste the same, would it? I know at least two or three local restaurants that changed hands (some closed, some not yet) where the food tasted noticeably worse after the new ownership.

I'm sure that Little Caesar's pizza recipe is standard. Yet I've been to a few Little Caesar's across the country and every one is different, even within the same town. So why is it that way?

Two Way Roads is back

Two Way Roads is back. Now maybe the clutter on Carbonizer can disappear.

Python

Ashamed of the crap I've let build up. Random scans, stuff I pulled off my desktop, et cetera, et cetera.

Anyway, I tried Python for the first time (which I should've done two years ago). A simple command:

% python
>>>Print ('Hello world!')


and got this in Terminal and Python Launcher:

Last login: Sun Jun 17 12:00:35 on ttys001
cd '/Users/*/Documents/Python/' && '/usr/bin/pythonw' '/Users/*/Documents/Python/helloworld.py' && echo Exit status: $? && exit 1
*-MacBook:~ *$ cd '/Users/*/Documents/Python/' && '/usr/bin/pythonw' '/Users/*/Documents/Python/helloworld.py' && echo Exit status: $? && exit 1
File "/Users/*/Documents/Python/helloworld.py", line 1
% python
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
*-MacBook:Python *$


So I have an error. A syntax error, but I don't know what. I followed my Python book exactly...

Note: because I like to keep my privacy, my first name is marked with a *.

E3 2012

E3 came and passed away, hardly seemed to last a day, but it's over, and what can I do?

E3 2012 was probably one the worse E3s I've seen in a while. Nothing to get excited about from any console:

- The PlayStation Vita, which I've seen but heard practically nothing about, didn't get a whole lot beyond LittleBigPlanet 2
- Nintendo was supposed to reveal more of the Wii U but all we got was Pikmin 3. I don't even know right now if Wii U is actually next-gen. And this is a console releasing this Christmas?!
- The Nintendo 3DS, which was saved from being a total failure, saw Luigi's Mansion 2, which everyone has heard about. No new 3DS games or remakes, except maybe Project P-100.
- No Wii games notable. All in all, the Wii was a rather disappointing console.
- Neither Sony or Microsoft showed off next-gen consoles. Halo 4 and Internet Explorer for Xbox 360 were shown.
- No Half-Life 3 or Episode 3.
- SimCity (2013) did nothing to quell my fears about the game. In addition to the always-online Origin integration, and the fact it resembles Cities XL both graphically (cartoonish, flat graphics), and the like, plus some goofy "tilt-shift" effect that doesn't even LOOK like a SimCity game, at all...it shames me to say that SimCity Social looks like a better game. I mean, at least it LOOKS like a SimCity title (plus, the trailers slammed CityVille). That's not say SimCity Social would be a better game, because both of them, in all honestly, look pretty terrible.

I don't know why I even care about Nintendo or its ilk. While there is a joy in playing games on a huge screen, and I enjoy Mario and Zelda (and Nintendo in general), I am bred to be a PC game player.

Dr Pepper Beef Jerky

Testing out a new scanner (and Image Capture!) with this beauty (beef jerky), which I ate a while back. Sadly, I could neither detect Dr Pepper very easily, plus Dublin Dr Pepper is gone.

It tasted a lot better than the "fruit punch" beef jerky I had later (which WAS easily detectable, tasty, not so much)

MIIIB

I recently saw (OK, today) saw Men in Black III. Besides being the typical ridiculous aliens and humans getting killed in some less than pleasant manner, it also contained one of the most darkest (but effective nonetheless) "Cerebus Retcon" in the history of the franchise, or even the trope as a whole.

Babies

I was eating at a Korean restaurant with one of my cousins recently, and he had his less-than-a-year old son with him. He seemed happy and quiet enough, and he listened patiently as I talked with his father. Then the food came, and it was served in a heavy black metal plate, still visibly steaming. I could tell that it was rather hot, but the baby was curious. He reached forward with his hands in curiosity. But it was hot, and his father wouldn't let him touch it. He tried again, and again failed. He started to get upset.

There was no way he wasn't going to cry, either throwing a tantrum because he COULDN'T touch the plate, but he would cry if he touched it and got burned.

Just something I hadn't thought about, I suppose.

Summer Progress Moving Along

- In, Around, and About Brazos Valley is moving along readily. Condemned gardening stores, small strip centers, and times where you could buy Whataburger with your meal plan.
- I beat Portal! [This was a triumph.] Now it's onto other games in my existing backlog, which include The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. On the PC, however, I'm going to play Evil Genius, which I purchased recently from GOG.com. But first! A break. Portal took me almost a year to beat, even though I've played no more than 9 hours on it. I think I need to focus better.
- While cleaning out my room, I found a sheet of paper with roads on it, from May 2011, when I was creating a "dream city" (I had a huge list on the iPod, see):

Fast Food Boulevard
Crayton Avenue <- Westheimer
Bassett Road <- north merger
Nacogdoches Drive
Main Street
Troseman Street <- Montrose through
Octavius Avenue
Texas Avenue
Jefferson Highway <- not a real highway
Heights Blvd.
Mario Road
Gradient Street
Memorial Drive
Veterans Memorial Drive
Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Riverside Parkway
Capital Avenue

It's obviously Austin, Baton Rouge, and Houston inspired, although there are nods to other cities ("Octavius Avenue" is a nod to San Francisco's "Octavia Boulevard"). I wrote it in "Cousin L"'s old bedroom in the house where she grew up. Cousin L no longer lives there anymore, though. I think I mentioned Cousin L before, right?

- My scanner application doesn't work anymore (I updated it so its Universal Binary), so I can't show you my sketch, "Grocery Wars". Boo! Personally, my scanner is bulky (it's also an inkjet printer, which has problems) and I wish I had Photoshop, too.

- I started to write down (this is last summer, again) all the problems with the Windows port of the 1990 classic Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel, with the "A salad doesn't fret..." line repeated twice. It runs too fast in the iMac G3 (of course, I could get a speed throttler), too slow in Basilisk II ('lisk has a huge problem with transitions), probably not at all in SheepShaver (I believe its still 68k, and SheepShaver doesn't really have a 68k processor ready), and won't mount in Mini vMac. GRR.

- I also pulled out an old map from 2010 showing the new Metro lines in Houston, which were supposed to be complete by now (instead, there are some areas with track, but nothing beyond the 2004 stretch is running). I wish I could just go to the Northwest Transit Center and get to the majority of inner-loop Houston via train, but alas...