the hunt for a decent cake mix

Talking with Poonam last night, she said she was on her way to a party and was bringing cupcakes. Cupcakes! I hadn’t made cupcakes in years, and the thought of getting sprinkles and icing all over Jon’s clean, new kitchen was too irresistible to pass up. When searching through the grocery store baking aisle, though, I got increasingly frustrated. Every cake mix and icing I found had partially hydrogenated oil, which I try to avoid. Duncan Hines, Betty Crocker, and Pillsbury all listed it. I was only checking chocolate cake mixes and frosting, but I doubt their other flavors would be PHO-free, either. It seems anymore every label I check at the supermarket has the stuff. It’s in the weirdest places sometime, too, like in a particular brand of sprinkles I looked at last night. Honestly, sprinkles need oil? I was under the impression they were basically little balls of colored sugar. I guess some companies make little balls of oily colored sugar–yum! Anyway, Kroger’s store brand of Devil’s Food cake mix and fudge icing was PHO-free, so I went with it. Jon was a little leery because it listed lard as an ingredient in one of them and beef fat in the other (I think the icing), but I’d rather eat animal bits than dangerously processed oils.

Every time I see partially hydrogenated oil or monosodium glutamate listed as an ingredient, I put the item back on the shelf. I wish food manufacturers would stop using both of those. If I see an item that looks especially appealing and I’m all set to buy it, then check the ingredients list and see one of those chemicals, my reaction is usually “sorry guys, I would’ve bought your product but now I can’t–you just lost a sale.”

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Windows 7 64-bit ahoy!

Look at this glorious screenshot taken from the system information of my desktop PC:

All 4GB of RAM recognized by Windows 7 64-bit

You see that? All 4GB of my RAM are finally recognized by Windows 7! No more “4GB (3GB usable)”! I just now installed the 64-bit version because I’ve been having a slew of troubles with The Sims 3 in Windows 7 32-bit, plus I wanted to go to 64-bit anyway, so I figured I’d take the leap. Even with 64-bit, I had 3GB of usable RAM because some was marked as “hardware reserved.” After a bit of Googling, I found I should check my BIOS settings for something like the following: frame buffer size, video buffer size, or memory remapping. I found the latter but there were two options: h/w remapping and s/w remapping. More Googling and forum-checking led me to enable s/w remapping and leave h/w remapping disabled. Boot into Windows, and I see the above information–huzzah!

I still have EA Download Manager installing The Sims 3, so it’ll be a while yet before I know if this has fixed my oh-so-annoying crashes. I would be playing along, doing fine, when suddenly my screen would go black and audio would be caught in a loop. My monitor light would go orange and there would no longer be a signal to the monitor. The only way to fix it was to hold in the reset button. This seemed to most often happen when I was scrolling across the map. It happened less frequently when I ran in windowed mode and killed all processes I thought I didn’t need. It was getting to the point where I saved every 5 minutes because it was so frequent, and so annoying to lose all that unsaved progress.

Posted in Techy | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

fuzzy animal photos and a rant about Indian restaurants

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.

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semester wrapup and LBP

I’m still alive! The semester is winding down and homework-wise I’m almost done. I just have to finish one last Linux kernel project and, after a poster presentation on Thursday, I’ll write an executive summary about my usability project and be done. I have a group presentation to give in a little bit, then I’ll find Poonam and she if she wants to get some lunch/dinner.

I’ve been playing Fat Princess like crazy lately, ever since discovering the wonderful Cake Lair forum filled with hardcore players. I convinced my friend Dan to get the game and, by extension, his roommate Tony has also been playing with me. They’re excited about the game because they say it’s similar to Team Fortress 2, with all the classes. I finally made it to Queen rank and have been practicing my Ranger skills.

Besides Fat Princess, Jon got me a second Sixaxis controller and Little Big Planet for my birthday, so we’ve been doing two-player co-op with that. We brought it to Dan and Tony’s house this past weekend and had a good four-player session, but we died so much in The Wedding section.

My parents had some crazy weather recently, involving such powerful wind that a huge branch broke off their box elder tree and landed in the dogwood tree. Mom’s flower pots and plants were strewn about, and a neighbor’s barn blew down. We didn’t have as much trouble here in Lexington, only getting sheets of rain and some wind. I slept well those nights because rain always lulls me to sleep; I love a good thunderstorm.

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why I hate shopping

I just got back from a run to Target. Buying things like toilet bowl cleaner and a shower liner were easy tasks, but when it came to finding the object that made me decide on Target over Meijer or some other store in the first place, it was a pain in the neck. I store my makeup on my bathroom sink in a cute little plastic bag thing that is suspended on little metal feet. Problem is, metal in a bathroom rusts and stains things. On a side note, why do so many things intended to go in the bathroom on your sink or tub contain metal? I wanted to replace this little storage creature with some solid plastic cube in a pretty color or pattern, and I figured Target would be the place to find such a box because they generally have cute apartment-decorating things.

I first checked their make-up section but all I found there in terms of storage were cloth bags with zippers or lidded metal+plastic boxes. I don’t want my makeup tucked away under a lid, nor do I want cloth or metal anything on my sink. I moved on to their bathroom section and found storage for the shower, intended to hold shampoo bottles. I continued my search in the storage section, finding a lot of plastic crates that were way too big and full of holes. Some exuberant clerk tried to help me find something and we eventually ended up in the kitchen storage area where he suggested a Rubbermaid food container and I could just remove the lid. Problem there is those things are clear plastic and I wanted something more decorative. I figured I’d go to Bed Bath and Beyond to try my luck there, when I glanced across the aisle into the toy department. They had their summer toys on display along with beach paraphernalia, which included sand buckets. My brain-hamsters kicked into full gear and I wandered over. I found a tiny blue sand bucket with an orange handle, solid plastic, no holes, and the perfect size for my makeup collection:

bucket o' makeup

I would have preferred different colors, like maybe lime green and purple, or pink and brown, but I can deal with the colors since everything else was spot-on what I needed. Children’s beach toys FTW!

But that’s not why I hate shopping. Why I hate shopping is because of two things: 1) clothes are annoyingly not sized to my body and 2) toddlers piss me off.

First the clothes. I browsed some of the shirts and summery cargo pants and found the whole process frustrating. With the shirts, a plain solid-colored shirt was labeled as “fitted” so it was slim-fitting, which is meh but I can take it, but it was also thin, so it hugged my stomach and clearly showed my belly button. That’s just weird to me unless I’m specifically going for the belly-delineating look. So I went up to a large size to counteract the fittedness and moved on to polo shirts. I tried on a medium and it engulfed me since it was marked as “relaxed” fitting. Whatever, so I bought a small and it suited me nicely. It was a good length, too; I have a longish torso and often have problems with shirts showing my midriff when they’re supposed to cover it. So I ended up with a small and a large from the same brand because of relaxed/fitted style differences.

The pants I tried on, all in my jean size mind you, all looked horrible on me. They were the thin cargo-pant style with slanted hip pockets and a low rise, and from what I could tell, they were all designed for men because there was no room whatsoever for your butt. When I got them on, the waistband at the back was way low because of my ass occupying space, and the waistband in the front was where it should normally sit. Because I do have a butt, though, and all the pant real estate was spent on containing said butt, there was this odd shift such that the crotch was way up; that’s just as uncomfortable for women as I would wager it is for men. So, no pants. I will try my luck elsewhere, perhaps at Old Navy where I usually end up buying my jeans. I hear tell that clothes designed for black women would suit me great, since the pants are intentionally curvy, but anytime I’ve checked out such brands or stores, their prices are higher than I want to pay. :(

As for toddlers and why they bug me, the entire time I was there, wandering throughout the whole store, there was some squalling kid within ten yards of me. I don’t know if motherly instincts don’t kick in until you’re actually about to pop, but I detest screeching toddlers. I hastily went about trying to find whatever item on my list I needed, just so I could sooner GET. AWAY. FROM. THAT. NOISE. Maybe babies are like cats or stray dogs: once one starts hollering, all the others have to join in. I know it wasn’t the same child the whole time because at one point I saw some little girl go running down the aisle, blubbering and presumably chasing a parent. Protip: if they see you start to run, you’ll never make your getaway; maybe you could stash them in a bin somewhere while you try to escape? Anyway, a few minutes later when I changed aisles, there was some small boy also wailing just outside my aisle. I guess the makeup section, halfway across the store from the baby section, is also a popular haunt for young mothers and their progeny. I text-messaged Jon when I left saying that I managed to leave Target without committing any acts of infanticide.

Posted in Opinions | Tagged , , | 1 Comment | Current music Such Great Heights by The Section Quartet