Fun Tea Recipe

This is the recipe for "Fun Tea" - an alcholic drink based on a Long Island Ice Tea. It usually goes in a dispenser labelled "Fun Tea" next to another dispenser of iced tea labelled "Boring Tea".

Where I call out a certain brand, it is a strong recommendation. Where I don't call out a certain brand, just use something inexpensive. You won't notice the difference.

To make a single drink:
1/2 shot vodka
1/2 shot gin
1/2 shot Kraken spiced rum
1 shot Centenario Anejo tequilla
2 1/2 shots sweet and sour mix
5 shots Coke Zero
2 splashes of bitters, or, if you can get it, 5 drops of Bitterman's Elemakule Tiki Bitters

To make this, use a large glass and start by putting the Bitters at the bottom, then add ice, then add the alchohol and give it a couple of swirls to mix the bitters in. Next quickly pour in the sweet and sour, and last quickly pour in the Coke Zero. If the pour wasn't hard enough to cause mixing, stir with a spoon.

To make larger quantities, simply scale up. For example, to make 7 quarts (1.75 gallons):
11 ounces (325 ml) of vodka
11 ounces (325 ml) of gin
11 ounces (325 ml) Kraken spiced rum
23 ounces (680 ml) Centenario Anejo tequilla
56 ounces (1,656 ml) sweet and sour mix
112 ounces (3,312 ml) Coke Zero
23 splashe of bitters, or 30 drops of Bitterman's Elemakule Tiki Bitters

We generally put this into a large dispenser with a spout and put some colorful frozen plastic cubes filled with water (plastic ice cubes) in it to keep it chilled and then have some regular ice near it that people can put in their glass.

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Contra Costa Community Colleges need some Class

My daughter is attending a four year university. She would like to take a class at our local community college over the summer to reduce the load on her next semester. She wants to take Calculus 2. Maybe “wants” is too strong a word. However she is trying to take it.

However, the community college system here seems to be populated by people who need to take some classes on how to operate a school. They will not allow you to sign up for Calculus 2 unless you have completed Calculus 1 at another school or – and get this – are currently in Calculus 1 at their school. So – if you want to come home and take it over the summer and are in the prerequisite now, you need not bother to apply. They won’t take you. You have to have finished the earlier class. A letter from your teacher showing that you currently have a high score and are about to complete the class within the month – not good enough. Instead, you have to wait until the class is full. Which is the same thing as saying you have to wait until you can supply a transcript. That happens at about the time the summer class starts – at which time it will be full anyway. Why the students currently at the community college get a pass and can sign up for the next class without the level of proof that university students must provide is a mystery for the ages. It just doesn’t add up. It is an irrational number.

Stardock ModernMix fixes Windows 8

If you’ve used Windows 8 on a standard non-touch desktop or notebook (especially with a large monitor) you’ve probably come to the same conclusion I have: Whoever made the decision that this “Modern UI” (Metro) should require apps to be full screen on a non-tablet device is a complete moron. I actually had to connect a second monitor to my home system just so that I could perform a very normal use case – watching a web cast while playing Microsoft Free Cell. Yes, it is true. You can’t do that with just one monitor because Free Cell is Metro and the 80 – 20 Metro snap doesn’t fit well with either app having the 80%.

At work, it is worse. I have a 27” 2560 x 1440 monitor. I don’t want anything to ever be full screen.

Well, Stardock to the rescue. They have a new product in beta called ModernMix that does exactly what Microsoft should have done. It allows you to run Metro apps in a Window on the desktop. Beautiful! I installed the beta today and it is working great so far. I’ll absolutely buy it when it ships.

Way to go Stardock. Taking a simple concept that Microsoft completely missed and making it work.

Why Does Hollywood Hate Their Customers?

Just before Christmas I was looking for some stocking stuffers and I came across a movie my wife and I had missed when it was in theaters: the remake of Total Recall. I went ahead and picked it up and placed it in her Christmas stocking. We planned to watch it on the 26th, after attending Jack Reacher in the theater and getting some dinner.

We had a lot of trouble simply watching Total Recall. I’ll detail it below. First though let me cover a couple of things:

• We’ve never pirated movies. We actually like big budget Hollywood movies and think the people working on the films should be compensated and that folks should not be violating copyright.
• The current copyright term lengths are absolutely ridiculous and get more ludicrous every time that Steamboat Willie gets close to going public domain. Copyright is definitely no longer what it was intended to be and is now a tax on society instead of a boon.

OK, that said, on to why Hollywood seems to hate us.

We open the box so we can watch the movie. Inside are two disks. This box is supposed to contain both the “Director’s Cut” and the “Theatrical Version”. At first glance, we can’t figure out which disk to put in.

One says just “Original Film” and “Unrated”. The other says all of this: “Original Film”, “Theatrical Version”, “PG-13”, “Extended Director’s Cut”, and “Unrated”. I make what I thought was a solid guess and go for the second one with all the words on it since neither disk says anything like “bonus content” or “behind the scenes” or “gag reel”. I put it in and it defaults to “Theatrical Version”. There doesn’t appear to be a way to change the little “dot” that tells you which one is selected. The “Director’s Cut” seems to be a different color, and although we can change the color back and forth, the “dot” won’t move. We give up and try the other disk. Nope, bogus bonus content that nobody wants.

Back to the original disk. I change the color again with the right arrow and press enter. Only THEN does the dot move over to show the selection changed. That’s right: it moves when you actually tell it to play – and of course only shows for a half second. It is very hard to tell which version you have selected.

We thought we were home free. We were enjoying the movie up until it got to 1:45:03. At that point the picture froze for about 5 seconds and the Blu-Ray player rebooted. What the heck? How can a disk be so defective right out of the box that it reboots the damn player? So, we fire it up again and get as close as we can to 1:45:03 by using the scene select. We start it up and sure enough, the player reboots at the same place. Boy these devices with an operating system and DRM are crazy. I never had this happen with old DVDs. If you got a problem one, you fast forwarded through any bad spots. But this one reboots reliably right at this same point. By the way, we had one outstanding software update on the player so we ran that and got up to date. Same problem. We ended up having to go past the area with scene select that back up until 1:46:00 so we could watch the rest of the movie.

All in all, between getting the right disk in there, getting the Director’s Cut selected properly, having the player reboot multiple times and having to get everything back to the right place we wasted about 30 minutes just trying to watch the damn movie.

Wait, what? Yes, 30 minutes wasted due to just stupid stuff like:

• Improperly labeled disks
• Poor implementation of DVD Menu
• Section on the disk capable of rebooting Blu-Ray players (probably something with the DRM scheme; who knows)

Now – how about the pirated version? From what I hear, you just search for it, download it and play it. No stupid unskippable region calling me a pirate and trying to claim that copyright violation is equivalent to theft (per the law, it isn’t). No preview trailers that I have to fast forward, no reboots, no problems.

Why does Hollywood insist on delivering a product that is inferior to that delivered by the folks pirating Hollywood videos? My only conclusion is that they hate their customers.

My “Three Screen” problem

I admit it: I have a first world problem. If you are reading this, you probably have some too. My first world problem is one of “too many screens”. I’ve got a notebook computer, a Nexus 7 (7 inch Android tablet), and an absolutely awful phone – a Motorola Droid 3 stuck forever running Android 2.3 even though 4.0 came out only 3 months after the release of this extremely lousy phone. In fact, Motorola wants to offer me a $100 rebate to buy one of their current phones since they screwed up so badly on the Droid 3 and their lack of commitment to updates. My three screen problem comes into play when I want to sit on the couch. Yes, the couch.

You see, I may have mentioned that I have three screens. And I need all of them there with me. I don’t want to have them all there. I’d prefer to have just the Nexus 7. But what if my phone rings? What if I want to edit my Google Docs Spreadsheet? I almost always end up carrying all three of these devices around the house because they just can’t seem to pickup each other’s tasks. For instance the phone. Why in the heck can’t I leave it on the charger and have it send the calls over to my Nexus 7? They are both Android and they are both on the same WiFi network. I mean I do Google+ hangouts (video calls) on the tablet all the time so I know it has acceptable hardware to handle a voice call. Get with it Google – set this up so that calls can show up on the most convenient device.

Next, I come in from running and showering and sit down. I browse the web a bit on the tablet and then want to enter my stats into my Google Docs Spreadsheet. Can I do that on the tablet? Well, sort of. It will come up. But it has an “Edit” button on each row that you have to hit to edit that row and then a submit button you have to click to save the row. It is a major pain to edit this way, so I grab the notebook and do it. Honestly Google – fix this. You’ve been saying you would for months. Please ship the update that allows normal editing on a tablet.

Three screens. This sucks. Google, you can fix this for me so that I only need to keep one of these with me when I am in the house. Please, please do so.

Apparently it’s bloat week for Verizon and Motorola

So, not only did Verizon and Motorola completely ignore this (and the multitude of other people telling them similar things), they seem to have decided that this is the week to piss off people by sending them an extra copy of the bloat. That’s right, not only the copy that we can’t delete from our own phones, but an “update” so that now there will be two copies taking up room on the phone. Here’s what greeted me this morning:

Yes, “My Verizon”, “NFL Mobile”, “V CAST Tones” (do they really believe people still think they have to pay for ringtones?), “VZ Navigator”, “Blockbuster”, “GoToMeeting”, “Slacker Radio”, and “Verizon Video”. None of these have ever been started even once on my phone. In fact, I use Launcher Plus and have the icons for these hidden so that I can’t launch them by fat-fingering.

I want this absolute rubbish off of my phone. I don’t want updates to it.

Once CyanogenMod 9 gets everything working for the Droid 3, that will be going on my phone for sure. This foistware is just ridiculous.