mdobossy's Profile

No fall food here yet.. :( Itching to get some acorn squash and make some pumpkin soup.

My wife wants me out of the kitchen for a while though- she got me a Shun Elite Ken Onion for my birthday (woohoo!). Unfortunately I found out just how sharp they are with my left index finger.. and she said she wants me to actually keep all my fingers.. doh! And I thought my Henckels were sharp! ;)

"The WWDC was disappointing . . . my AAPL stock dropped 4 bucks because of it."

AAPL almost always has a significant drop in the aftermath of Jobs' keynotes. Typically the rumor mills get a goin' in the weeks before the keynote. 3/4 of the predictions fall short, so a bunch of people sell their stock. Within a week or two, it is usually over where it was before the keynote. Most analysts are predicting AAPL to go up to 140 in the coming months. Think of the drop as a good time to buy more! ;)

As for the keynote being disappointing, it is a developers conference after all. As much as I would have liked to see new hardware (C'mon Apple! An nVidia 7300GT as the default in the Mac Pro!?!?), this conference is for Apple devs, and much of the under-the-hood stuff for Leopard looks very exciting!

When clustering, 128GB is not all that much. A moderate cluster can easily have 10x that much RAM. For example, one cluster I run jobs on has 256 dual processor nodes, each with 4GB of RAM, for a total of 1024GB. This particular cluster is nowhere near the top of the heap. The BlueGene L at Livermore has 131072 processors, each with 256megs of RAM, or 32,768GB of RAM. (EEK!)

Counter knife block, in drawer knife block, or magnetic strip on the wall (or other).. which do you prefer for your knives, and why?

Good luck on the draft betsbillabong! Its a long journey, but feels oh so good when done. (Even better than purging clothes ;) )

I second Gorilla Glue- that'll stick just about any material to wood. Be careful though- as it reacts, it can bubble out if you put too much on. Have a damp rag ready to wipe it away if this happens. If you let the bubbled out glue harden, it is nearly impossible to get off.

Borax is great (we use it to clean almost EVERYTHING, environmentally safe and puppy friendly). Here's another green cleaning tip:

Have a really cruddy oven? Try baking soda. Make a paste out of baking soda and water, and spread it all over the inside of your oven at 8am, then close the oven. At 11am, 2pm, and 5pm take a spray bottle and re-wet the baking soda. At 5:30, order a pizza, as you don't have an oven to cook with. Then at 8pm, take a plastic scraper, and scrape the baking soda out of the oven. The baking soda will take with it all of the grease and crud that has built up in the oven. You will then need to rinse out the oven. It takes more work than a degreasing chemical, but is environmentally friendly, and does a better job! :)

My wife and I did this to our nasty rental oven with 30 years of grime (YUCK!), and now it looks brand new!

Thanks for the encouragement Clairepetrol! For the first round (as embarrassing as this is) I did the "If I haven't even thought about it in 3 years let alone worn it" rule, and that got me down to about 50%.. But I can already feel how much "lighter" it'll be when all this extra junk is gone.. quite liberating actually!

Now I just have to convince myself that all the good memories are in my head, not in those old, falling apart, dingy, undergrad t-shirts! :D (Let it go Mark... let it go...)

I think I'll run with this one, with one modification-

Instead of toasting the bread, assemble the sandwich, brush on a little olive oil, and put it in the panini press. Get that Mozzarella all nice and gooey..