My Substitute Reality -You're just jealous cause the little voices only talk to me-

Monday May 25, 2009

Tamales!

Filed under: Food — don @ 11:35 pm

I made tamales today. I’ve always wanted to make them so today I finally got all the stuff and did it. I got corn husks and already made masa at the Mexican supermarket near us. I made a mistake with the masa and bought tortilla masa. I didn’t even look as I didn’t know they made tortilla masa. I had to go back to get the tamale masa. I bought carnitas for the filling.

It was pretty easy to make them but it’s a little time consuming. It took about 20 minutes or so to make 15. After you make them you have to steam them for close to 2 hours. I must say they were pretty darn good. Next time I would use more filling. This picture isn’t very good but it’s the only one I took. You get the idea.

p5250860

Wednesday May 13, 2009

Geek Alert!!!

Filed under: Geek — don @ 12:46 am

Ok, this is one of the geekiest things I’ve ever done but other geeks will love it. I recently got a Mac Mini so that I could try to create some apps for the iPhone. I might be able to make a few bucks or not but I know a lot of people have quit their day job because of it. Since I don’t have a day job at the moment I’ve nothing to lose.

Anyways, this is not about that. This is about VirtualBox. Daryl told me about it a while ago and I had played with it and a similar thing called VM Ware.

I got to thinking about the possibility of installing it on my Mac and sure enough there was a version for it. Here’s a picture of my Mac’s screen with a Windows 7 VB and and an Ubuntu VB running at the same time.

My propeller is spinning at about 8,000 RPM.

virtualboxmac

Here’s an update showing I added Windows XP.

virtualboxmac2

And one more update showing I added Suse and Windows 98.

vbmax

Thursday May 7, 2009

Bad, Bad Manny!

Filed under: Life — don @ 6:42 pm

Manny Ramirez who is a very good player on the Dodgers got suspended for 50 games today for using a banned substance. The substance he used was a gonadotropin which is used to raise the testosterone level. It is also used to improve a person’s sex drive. It is also used to replenish a person’s testosterone level after using steriods. That 3rd category is what has everyone up in arms.

Manny did use a banned substance but he did not test positive for steroids. The substance he did use is not a performance enhancer as far as muscle tone is concerned. It does make you a better lover but I think we all can agree that’s not what anyone is doing on the baseball diamond.

Lots of people are screaming that the Dodgers should be stripped of all the runs and RBIs that Manny was responsible for and have their won/loss record adjusted. I understand that sentiment so I decided to find out what would happen if you remove all of his runs and RBIs. Here’s the results of that exercise. The one thing that we have to decide is in the case of ties who gets the win? I don’t think it would be fair to suggest that the Dodgers lose all games that come out as ties but I have that as an option. In that case the Dodgers would be 3 games down from San Francisco now and 1 game behind San Diego and Colorado. They would still be 3 games ahead of Arizona. In fact in every scenario the Dodgers stay ahead of Arizona. The only scenario that has them not in the lead is the aforementioned “lose all ties” case. So here’s how it would look if they took all of Manny’s runs and RBIs.

mannyla2

Tuesday May 5, 2009

Garden Update

Filed under: Life — don @ 7:50 pm

Here’s a couple of photos that show our tomato and pea plants. Everything else is pretty much dead.

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Monday May 4, 2009

Obama & Narcissism

Filed under: Nothing,Politics — don @ 1:02 pm

Read on a blog somewhere but you can find this easily if you do a search for Samuel Vaknin.

Narcissism (dictionary meaning for those who don’t know the word): From Greek mythology, a youth doomed to fall in love with his own image until he pined away and died, his corpse being changed in to a flower which bears his name (Narcissus). In psycho-analysis, an abnormal love, preoccupation and admiration for oneself.

Samuel Vaknin, Ph.D. Dr. Vaknin has written extensively about Narcissism.

Dr. Vaknin states ” I must confess I was impressed by Sen.Barack Obama from the first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident – a wholesome presidential package. I was put off soon, not just because of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor that was unsettling. His posture and his body language were louder than his empty words.

Obama’s speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history. Never a politician in this land had such quasi “religious” impact on so many people. The fact that Obama is a total incognito with zero accomplishment, makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming.

Obama is not an ordinary man. He is not a genius. In fact he is quite ignorant on most important subjects. Barack Obama is a narcissist.

Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the Malignant Self Love believes “Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist.”

Vaknin is a world authority on narcissism. He understands narcissism and describes the inner mind of a narcissist like no other person. When he talks about narcissism everyone listens.

Vaknin says that Obama’s language, posture and demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, dearest and nearest suggest that the Senator is either a narcissist or he may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

Narcissists project a grandiose but false image of themselves. Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of People’s Temple, the man who led over 900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even murder their own children was also a narcissist. David Koresh, Charles Manson, Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Stalin, Saddam, Mao,Kim Jong Ill and Adolph Hitler are a few examples of narcissists of our time. All these men had a tremendous influence over their fanciers. They created a personality cult around themselves and with their blazing speeches elevated their admirers, filled their hearts with enthusiasm and instilled in their minds a new zest for life. They gave them hope! They promised them the moon, but alas, invariably they brought them to their doom.

When you are a victim of a cult of personality, you don’t know it until it is too late. One determining factor in the development of NPD is childhood abuse. “Obama’s early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations,” says Vaknin. “Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant (two years old). Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then his mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia, a foreign land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father. At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. She died of cancer in 1995”.

One must never underestimate the manipulative genius of pathological narcissists. They project such an imposing personality that it overwhelms those around them. Charmed by the charisma of the narcissist, people become like clay in his hands. They cheerfully do his bidding and delight to be at his service. The narcissist shapes the world around himself and reduces others in his own inverted image. He creates a cult of personality. His admirers become his co-dependents.

Narcissists have no interest in things that do not help them to reach their personal objective. They are focused on one thing alone and that is power. All other issues are meaningless to them and they do not want to waste their precious time on trivialities. Anything that does not help them is beneath them and do not deserve their attention..

If an issue raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or another, he has no interest in it. The “present” vote is a safe vote. No one can criticize him if things go wrong. Those issues are unworthy by their very nature because they are not about him.

Obama’s election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations. The University of Chicago Law School provided him a lot longer than expected time and at the end it evolved into, guess what? His own autobiography! Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on race relations, for
which he had been paid, Obama could not resist writing about his most sublime self. He entitled the book Dreams from My Father. Not surprisingly, Adolph Hitler also wrote his own autobiography when he was still nobody. So did Stalin. For a narcissist no subject is as important as his own self. Why would he waste his precious time and genius writing about
insignificant things when he can write about such an august being as himself?

Sunday May 3, 2009

My daughter is famous!

Filed under: Nothing — don @ 11:56 pm

Maybe famous is too strong a word. Maybe it would be better to just say she’s in a photo that will probably be viewed by millions. Maybe not soon, but before it’s replaced with another one.

Ok, what the heck am I talking about? I’m talking about Google Maps Street View. It seems Heather and either Camden or Carsten were outside when the picture car went by. You can see fairly well in one of the shots. I can’t tell which grandson it is but it’s definately Heather. I would post the address but I don’t think that would be such a great idea. If you know them then you know where to look.

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