My finals are tomorrow, and then this semester will be over! I’m going to take a visit home to my parents’ house soon and, boy, am I excited because they have had new ducklings and kittens born while I was away:
Despite what it looks like, I don’t think my dad was poking the kittens with some metal pipe when he took that photo. The kittens are in the trunk of a 1940-something Oldsmobile that hangs out in our garage, if you were wondering at their surroundings. The duck-mama took her brood to stay underneath a different car, one that stays outside the garage. That’s a miniature duck, so the adult duck in that photo is about the size of a pigeon, meaning the ducklings are D’AWWW-inducingly tiny. Jon may or may not be able to come with me, though it looks like at this point he won’t be able to since a friend of his is flying in from the west coast the weekend I plan on visiting. Pity, too: my dad promised Jon he could have a kitten if he came, possibly one with ketchup…
I’ve been plunging through the final chapters in Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love in preparation for my kernel final tomorrow. I hope I do at least as well on the final as I did on my midterm; I got a 70-something percent and that was above the class average…
Jon and I had a horrible experience the other day getting Indian food. We love this one restaurant and usually eat there if we want Indian, but recently we’ve been branching out to see if we’ve been missing out on other awesome Indian cuisine in Lexington. It turns out that I don’t think we have. I tried dinner at one hole-in-the-wall location and it was okay, nothing great, and the ‘mild’ was much spicier than I expected. I got chicken madras based on Poonam’s suggestion, and we both thought it was all heat and no flavor. Nuts to that place. Then Jon and I went to a very expensive Indian place downtown that we had enjoyed once before (or I had, with my chicken tikka masala; Jon didn’t care for the chicken curry the first time). We each tried something different there on this occasion than we had before, me going with the mango chicken and him with the chef’s special. Jon ordered medium, I got mild, and both came out incredibly mild. Mine was tangy and okay, but really the sauce was just kind of boring. Jon was disturbed because he had asked our waitress if that meal came with white meat chicken, and she assured him it did, but it was very much dark meat. Again, his meal’s flavor was just dull. I got plain naan and he got garlic naan, and my naan was okay, but not nearly as puffy as I like. Jon said his garlic naan had very little flavor and was, again, not puffy enough. We concluded when we left that we could’ve made something better than that ourselves at home, and we only cook Indian food on occasion, so we’re by no means practiced. That seems like the worst insult you could give a chef at an Indian restaurant: a white boy cooks better Indian food than you.
I think we’ve been spoiled by our usual Indian restaurant, which has food so good that every bite is just awesome and makes you want to keep eating. At both of the other Indian restaurants I’ve tried recently, I got bored eating before I was full, and a Subway sandwich started to sound good. I don’t know if we just dislike south Indian foods, since Poonam has described those as being sweeter and milder, and that definitely describes mine and Jon’s food at the recent expensive Indian place. Maybe that’s just the style, to have boring, tasteless food, but I somehow doubt it.
Dragon Age and credential grumblings
What have I been up to these past weeks? Playing a lot of Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening on my PS3, that’s what. Well, that and working. Neither of which leads to much discussion, so I haven’t written here and I’ve not emailed my parents as much, causing them to wonder if I’d fallen off the planet. I should send my mom a link to view my PS3 trophies online—that would show her I’m still alive.
I’ve run through Origins once as a mage and most of the way a second time as a rogue before I got tired of it and switched to Awakening. I ended up finding a glitch letting me get a party member (Velanna) after I was supposed to, and getting into an area that was supposed to be locked down (the Silverite Mine), so I switched characters and ran through as a blood mage. Bioware has announced they’re not fixing the Silverite Mine bug, which I don’t understand because there are plenty of other unpickable door locks, so why can’t they fix that one? When I first got in there, none of the dialogue made sense because I hadn’t gotten Velanna in my party and she hadn’t told me her story yet. I missed out on some cut scenes that I later saw when I ran through as a blood mage, too.
On the subject of glitches, I wish more sites would use OpenID for authentication. I rather consider it a glitch that every time I want to log into, for example, my cell phone provider’s site, I have to use their Reset Password form because their password restrictions keep out my passwords of choice. It’s ridiculous, too, because I like having, say, exclamation points in my passwords, but they disallow them, so my passwords are less secure. I don’t want to use the same password everywhere, though I guess OpenID would pretty much be the same thing. At least then I could focus on having one awesome password through a site like Google, that doesn’t have pointless password restrictions, and have that everywhere.