The Internet is a wonderful place, full of people writing about their lives and sharing their experiences.  One such person by the name of Lisa authors a blog called HomeSickTexan.  Lisa is in the same boat as myself, living somewhere other than Texas but longing for the tastes and smells that she grew up with.  Her posts detail a particular dish, why she loves it, where she has had the best of it and a recipe for the food that is closest to what she remembers.  Simply searching through her recipe index is enough to make your mouth water and with her being an excellent photographer, it doesn’t help the hunger reflex.  After finding this site, I set off into the kitchen to try my best to make my favorites on her site.

Mrs. Jackson’s Pralines 

I love pralines and its not something I have had it a very long time which made me want them more.  After following the recipe, I came across a few things that I knew Tesco wouldn’t stock such as Kayro Syrup and pecans.  I was wrong about the pecans (a whopping €5 a bag) and the Kayro came under another name, Lyles Golden Syrup.  I had everything I needed to make up a good batch of pralines.   I put all the ingredients into a pot and started stirring… then I stirred, and stirred some more.  I stirred while it was clumpy, I stirred while it was creamy.  I even stirred when the hot bits of sugary goodness leaped out of the pot and attempted to bond with my arm.  That’s how dedicated I was to these pralines.  Sadly, they never became proper pralines, they just existed in a gooey runny fashion until my fiance made me throw them out.  They tasted wonderful, but it just wasn’t the portable version of the snack you know.  I must prefect my recipe and buy some welders gloves to keep the sugar lava off my skin.

Breakfast Sausage

No [respectable] breakfast should be without Owens breakfast sausage.  I didn’t realize how much I love the stuff until I didn’t have it.  The Irish have sausages, but they aren’t the same.  I could eat black and white pudding (black pudding is blood sausage mixed with bits of barley, sliced into patties and fried) which are fantastic, but nothing beats breakfast sausage.  HomeSickTexan had a recipe on her site but after trying it, I found it was a bit too healthy (its not from Texas if it doesn’t go straight your your arteries) for me and the taste just wasn’t spot on for me.  I found another recipe on FoodNetwork.com by Alton Brown which was spot on.

I went to the butcher’s next door and asked for a pork belly ground up with the fat.  What I got back was about 2 kilos of ground pork with a 60/40 meat/fat ratio.  This seems like a lot but after trying the recipe with a very lean ground pork, it just didn’t come out and Alton’s recipe emphasized the presence of fat.  On the way home, I stopped at SuperQuinn and picked up some fresh sage, thyme, and rosemary.  When I got home I mixed all the ingredients together and formed some quick patties and threw them in the skillet.  As soon as they started to cook, I could tell just by the smell that I had done a good job.  I stood in awe as ate my newest creation, astounded that I had pulled it off.  No one else really understands why it was such a big deal, but it was.

Chicken Fried Steak

Chicken fried steak was the first solid food I had after baby formula and I have been eating it non stop ever since.  Surprisingly enough, the Irish don’t really think that pounding a steak to bits, coating it in flour and deep frying it with their chips would be that pleasant.  On top of that, cream peppered gravy isn’t something often made, therefore you can deduce that no Irish man/woman in their right mind would make a chicken fried steak.  This is where I come in.

Sure you can go to any respectable restaurant in Texas and get a chicken fried steak, but how often do you actually make one yourself.   Its very very easy.  Priscilla and I went to Tesco to pick up bits and pieces and I decided in the store that I was going to go home and cook some chicken fried steak.  We found a round steak for about €3, bought a meat tenderizer and went home and started cooking.  Never using a meat tenderizer, I got the steak and started to beat the hell out of my meat tenderize it.  Once it had doubled in size I dropped it in the flour/salt/pepper mixture, then into the egg and milk, then into the flour again and into the hot oil.  Cooked for 3 minutes on one site and 4 on the other.  Had some prepackaged gravy that you mix with water and Priscilla did the mashed spudatoes.  All I can say about that meal is that it will be cooked on a weekly basis in our house from now until I die.

Cooking with raw ingredients and not pre-packaged foods is an amazing thing, especially when you make something fantastic.  I’m not a health nut, but it is nice to know that when you make breakfast sausage, you know exactly what is being put in it.  Go search the sites I mentioned and find something that makes you happy.

*Image curtosity of HomeSickTexan.blogspot.com

Leading up to the outage I had noticed an increased amount of spam comments being prompted for authorization. Ocassionally, zombie boxes (internet connected computers infected with spyware, forced to send spam in various formats) had been hitting my blog, adding stupid comments about cheap sexual virility drugs. At one point I recieved over 100 notifications that there were pending comments waiting to be approved for my article about hacking my Apple TV. My system was working by setting it up to where users had to wait for their comments to be approved before they were published, thus preventing spam from showing up on my posts but I had no idea it could cripple my blog.

My fiance pointed it out a few days ago that it was down, and again yesterday, Jackson brought it to my attention. When I tired to access the login, I was presented with a white page with no text or writing. After examining the page source I saw links for Cialias. Those bastards!

I found a way to get logged in and upgraded WordPress to 2.7 from 2.7 RC and it resolved the error. I also installed a plugin that will generate a captcha when you try to publish a comment. So, sorry for the added field and for making you squint at your screen when all you really want to do is say something silly, but its their for my protection… damn spam…

Last December I decided that for the new year I was going to open a computer repair company ran from my home.  Of course I would need a website so when I went to GoDaddy.com to register this domain, I opted out of their hosting plans for someone I knew and trusted, Globat.com.  Needless to say things started off rough in just a few months.

March

In December, I had purchased 12 months of hosting from them at about $7 per month.  This package gave me 1TB of online storage (who needs that much for online hosting, really?), billions of email addresses, and a unicorn that would make me coffee when I needed it… ok maybe not the unicorn but everything else.  In March I received an email from them saying that an upgrade for my account was available for $49.95 and that it would be automatically charged to my credit card if I did not reply stating I did not want the upgrade.  Being forgetful and a procrastinator can be costly sometimes.  At this point in my life I was wallowing in money and could care less, but I did know that they were tricky bastards that couldn’t be trusted.

September

Before I redid the site,  I wasn’t using it much.  No one really read the posts and I didn’t really write so it was almost like a desert that no one came to.  When I decided that I still had a few months to go with this domain and hosting account, I wanted to start using the site a bit more to keep in touch with my friends and family in the states.  Soon after getting things set up, my site went down.  I contacted their support team and they simply told me to try it in an hour.  Nothing.  I got back online with them and asked them to take a look as to why my site had gone down.  Again, wait an hour and try again, “the sysadmin fixed it”.  4 days the site was down before I started threating cancellation (which in hindsight, I should have done) and the site was brought back up.

October

I started noticing that it was taking in upwards of 30 seconds to 1 minute for my site to load.  I thought it could be wordpress being bloated with plugins or something so I deactivated everything and did a clean install of wordpress.  Still no joy.  I wrote into the support team and after about a month, still nothing had been done about the issue.  It was at this point I decided to cut my losses and go with someone a bit more reliable.  I called technical support to ask why nothing had been done about this.  The technician informed me that there was nothing he could do about the issue and that I would have to submit a ticket to the help desk to get the issue looked at.  I informed that I had already submitted my request to the help desk but nothing had been done about it which is why I was calling.  He then rudely told me to submit another ticket to get the issue looked at and there was nothing he could do.  When I asked if I could speak to his supervisor he told me his supervisor was on another call and couldn’t be reached.  When I asked to be put in a queue to speak with his supervisor he politely pressed the little red button to end the call.  I spent an hour and a half on the phone that night and was no closer to getting things resolved than before.

November

GoDaddy.com offered a better deal for a cheaper price and a better name.  Lets face it, when it comes to registering a domain, the first place to turn is GoDaddy.com.  About 1 week ago I recieved an email from Globat’s support center saying that they had tired to charge my account $94.15 for another years hosting but the transaction was declined.  I still had another 2 months left on my account and they are trying to charge me for another year I didn’t even ask for.  Assholes!  I replied to the email with the following:

I did not approve this charge to my account and I do not wish to carry on my serivces with your company.  My experience with Globat has been absolutely appalling and I do not wish to continue services with your company nor will I recommend anyone to use Globat for their web hosting needs.  My order was originally put through in December so I expect my service to last through then.  DO NOT CHARGE MY CREDIT CARD AGAIN.  I DO NOT WISH TO CARRY ON SERVICES WITH THIS ACCOUNT.

I recieved no appology or explanaition as to why it was charged, only this:

Dear Danial,

Thank you for contacting Globat.com.

We have established a dedicated cancellation line to handle account closures.  This is the only effective way to cancel your account.  Please call toll-free at 1-800-915-4090, between 9am and 5pm Pacific Standard Time, Monday through Friday.  Also, to better help you, please make sure you have your domain name, username and password, and the last 4 digits of the credit card used to open the account.  If you are calling from outside the United States, please dial +1-323-230-7442 instead

If you have any further billing questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at: 323-874-9000 Monday through Friday 9:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. PST.  You can also go through our supports page and go to our Live Chat system which is available Monday - Friday 9:00am - 5:00pm PST.

Yesterday I logged into GoDaddy.com and purchased a 3 month hosting deal to try out their services.  I started migrating over my blog while waiting for DNS to kick in.  Last night I got home and recieved this message in my inbox:

Dear Danial Clements,

We recently tried to process your renewal invoice for your Globat.com hosting  account. Unfortunately, the full amount for your renewal was not approved. As a courtesy to avoid any interruption of service, we have renewed your hosting account for 1 additional month with the credit card you have on file with us.

Invoice Number: 3999027
Invoice Amount: $7.95
Transaction ID: 2180565763
Date: Mon Nov 17 09:29:59 2008
Domain: thatoneitguy.com

They tried to charge the whole amout again but when it was declined they charged what they could to my account.  I couldn’t believe how underhanded this company was.  When I called and spoke to a customer support rep named Herbert he told me the charge would be reversed with no issue.  When I asked why my account had been charged when I asked it not, he said that their auto-renewal system automatically does this.  When I asked about opting out of the auto renewal feature, he told me there was only one way to opt-out and that was to go into my account information and enter in an incorrect mailing address and/or name on the account so that when the charge goes through, it would be declined.  I asked him again, “So, what you’re telling me is, the only way to not get charged with an auto-renewal is to fraudulently enter my information” and he confirmed this.  You have got to be kidding me.

When I asked to cancel my account with them, he told me to call a 1800 number to cancel my account.  I thanked him for his help and called the cancellation line.  When I called the number I was greeted with a recording that stated:

Thank you for calling the Globat Cancellation Line.  If you would like to cancel any addons or your entire hosting account, please go to the account management tab in the command console and follow the prompts to cancel your account.  Thank you for your business.

I followed her instructions and came to a prompt that said “Are you sure you wish to cancel your account?”  I clicked yes and then the site informed me to call the same 1800 number I had previously called.  I had been caught in a worm hole that is crappy webhosting.  Luckily there was a long distance number for international customers to call, so I called that number.  After a few rings a woman answered the phone, not with a “Thank you for calling Globat” just “Hello”.  I confirmed that I was speaking to the cancellation line and gave her my domain name.  She asked me why I was cancelling my account and I told her it was because of the very poor customer and technical service but she interupted me before I could finish and told me the account had been cancelled and then hung up on me.  At this point I wasn’t expecting to be treated like a customer or even a human being so it didn’t surprise me that she was so rude.  I did receive an email stating that my account has been cancelled and my new account is already up and running with GoDaddy so all is well.

I once heard a story on a podcast that I listen to that talked about a small company that sold bottles of wine online.  One day a customer called in and said that they had not received their proper order.  The customer had ordered a $15 bottle and a $150 bottle and the $150 bottle had not been received.  The CEO of the company respected the customer and didn’t want to immediately fire off an email to the customer calling him a liar and thought there could be more going on behind the scenes.  The company used a system in which all orders were weighed before leaving the store and that weight recorded in a database along with the order information.  The CEO looked up the order and saw that the weight of the order was that of two bottles and not just one.  Since the customer had only said he received 1 bottle, he knew the customer was lying but instead of calling him out on it, he just had another $150 bottle shipped to the customer.  Upon receiving the “replacement” bottle the customer when on to various different websites and posted outstanding reviews of the site and how great their customer service was.  The CEO knew that these reviews were worth more than that $150 bottle of wine in that it brought in more business for the company.  That loss was eventually made up in sales and all customers were happy.

I’m not saying that this post is going to bury Globat, I only have access to a limited number of readers, but when Google indexes this page, this information will be widely avaialbe to the entire world.  Treat your customers better and keep your end of the contract and you will be ahead.

Danial is running for president

and this is what I got…

Last night on the History Channel, I caught an episode of The Universe. This episode’s main focus was that of the end of the universe. How will the universe end? All we as humans really care about is our existance, which unless we kill ourselves first, shouldn’t happen for a few more billion years, that is unless we can develop means of colonizing other areas of the universe.

“In about 5 billion years, it [the Sun] will enter a red giant phase, its outer layers expanding as the hydrogen fuel in the core is consumed and the core contracts and heats up. Helium fusion will begin when the core temperature reaches around 100 million kelvin and will produce carbon, entering the asymptotic giant branch phase”

When the Sun does reach the “asymptotic giant branch phase”, some theories suggest the Earth will be gobbled up and swallowed, along with Mercury and Venus, although life would have ended long before this point as due to the increase in size of the Sun, all the water would have been boiled off and the Earth would likely resemble Mercury, lifeless and far too hot to support life as we know it.

As more and more stars consume their fuel they will gradually start to fade away. What was once a huge ball of fire and fury will condense and shrink into a glowing ember of its former self. If the Earth were still around at this point, the night sky would look much different than it does now. Chances are you wouldn’t be able to see one star in the sky. The moon wouldn’t glow because there would be no light for it to reflect. The universe would be a cold dark place.

As time goes on and these stars continue to burn what fuel they have left, their density gets greater and greater. Think of something the size of the Earth having a mass equal to that of the Sun. This level of density is something we can’t relate to because it doesn’t exist in every day life. Think of the difference between a 1 cm x 1 cm x 1 cm cube of wood and a cube with the same dimensions being made of steel. The steel cube would be heavier than the wood because it is more dense. Now lets compare a cube of steel and a cube of the highly dense white dwarf. The weight of the steel would be roughly 7.85 grams whereas the cube of white dwarf would weigh over 1 metric ton.

Gravity dictates that the heavier a body is the more attractive force it has on bodies around it. This is why the we are pulled towards the center of the Earth, why the moon doesn’t fly away and why we orbit the sun. Gravity is like magnetism for everything in the universe. As more and more stars start gathering matter and becoming more dense their gravity increases and they have more pulling power which gathers more matter… you see the point.

Ultimately, in billions of billions of years, the universe has transformed into something we can’t even imagine because all of the standards we have come to understand have been wiped away. As I can imagine, due to gravity, all matter in the universe would condense into one single ball. At some point this ball would become so dense it could no longer keep itself stable and in a very entergetic explosion, release all of its contents in to the far reaches of space. What does this sound like? Yes, the big bang.

My theory is that the universe is far older than we think it is. At this point we judge the beginning of the universe at about 4 billion years, but there is no way to tell if this was the first big bang. It could have been the 50th time the universe has expanded, life was created, everything condensed into a single point and then exploded back into existence.

I’m not a astrophysicist nor do I understand everything in our universe, but based on what I do know, this seems very plausible. In fact, after some quick research it appears I’m not the only one who believes in this idea. See The Big Crunch for more information.

So the other night I decided to pull down the ATV and see what would happen if I plugged it into the standard CRT television set.  Imagine my surprise when the Apple logo appeared on the screen!  Turns out, the ATV does have the 480i resolution programed in it but as long as it knows its plugged in via HDMI, it won’t display that option.  I quickly found the download I had gotten weeks ago and formated a thumb disk to apply the hack.  Sure enough after a few reboots, I had ssh access to my ATV.  I found a kernel extension that someone had written that would enable color composite video over the green jack on the ATV.  Few lines in terminal and I had an Apple TV displaying a beautiful color picture.  Here’s how I did it.

What you’ll need

• Apple TV with OS v2.2
• 512MB or higher thumb drive
• Mac running OS 10.5

1. Download atvusb-creator
2. Insert the thumb drive.  Ensure you have nothing on this drive you want to keep because it will be erased.
3. Unzip and run atvusb-creator.
4. Before running the application, you might want to disconnect any other external disks you may have plugged in because the interface in atvusb-creator uses /dev/disk1, /dev/disk2 to denote your volumes and if you aren’t Linux/Unix savy, you could erase the wrong disk.
5. Click on Create Using -> at the bottom of the window.  This will begin downloading a disk image from Apple which it will then patch and copy to the thumbdrive as an image that the Apple TV can boot.  This could take in upwards of 5 minutes with a high speed connection.
6. Once the process is complete, eject the thumb drive and plug it into your Apple TV and restart it.
7. If everything was successful you should see Tux with an AppleTV instead of the standard Apple logo followed by a bunch of lines of code.  When the install is finished it will inform you of so and tell you to remove the thumb drive and restart the Apple TV again.

Congradulations, you now have your very own hacked Apple TV.  Now what can you do with it?  Here are a few links and websites to get your started pimping your new box:

• Install XBMC - This is a must have!!
  
• AwkwardTV Wiki - Loads of information on hacking and new software
• AppleTV Hacks - Nice blog with news about software for the ATV

Truth be told, I only have 3 followers that I actually know out of a total of 24.  Now thats nothing compared to Kevin Rose or Barack Obama but I still feel proud that I have 24 other humans that are interested in my life.

Recently I have started using twitter alot and I have seen it turn from a microblogging system to an online, public chatroom where people see snippets of your conversation with others.  If you don’t have a twitter account, go sign up for one and start following me.