Today I attempted to make piggies in a blanket. The recipe is simple.

1 or more tubes of biscuits
1 little smokie per biscuit
Use cooking times and temperature from biscuit packaging.

Lightly grease a cookie sheet. Using one sausage per biscuit, wrap the smokie snuggly with a biscuit and place on the cookie sheet.

Apparently, I failed the “wrap smokie snuggly” part on some of the “Piggies in a Blanket” and ended up with new recipe which I’ve called “Piggies In and On a Blanket”. Next time I will try wetting the edge of the biscuit so that it stays together, or roll the biscuit until it appears seamless.

Close ups.

[gallery columns=”3” orderby=”post_name”]

I’ve create a gallery of photos from the remodel of Allison’s bedroom. She wanted her walls red with a dark wood floor. Given the experience we had with renovating my office in 2008, we were confident we could crank out most of the work over the MLK holiday weekend. As of this post we’ve completed everything except the baseboard and moving her in.

We ripped out the 13+ year old carpet and replaced it with a floating bamboo floor. The walls were painted with a dark brown (Behr Bison Brown) and then covered the brown with red (Behr Daredevil). The eggshell finish for the red gives it a glazed look and provides for an interesting finish over the brown. The original baseboard was repainted and replaced and shoe molding will be added to cover any gaps from contraction.

I hope to post a howto in the future, now that we’ve installed two floating floors using this bamboo flooring,

I learned something new today about a system called “Positive Pay” that’s used in the banking system. It’s one of those systems that you just wouldn’t notice until something went wrong.

Earlier today, I tried depositing a check from a company only to have the the teller inform me that it couldn’t be deposited today. When I asked why, she told me it was due to the fact that it wasn’t in the system. Once I got home and looked up the number for the company, I called them, explained the situation, and they simply retransmitted the check details.

Since I helped build an ACH processing solution, I was curious about what this system entailed. Descriptions from several locations appeared using this Google search. One of the better descriptions was from SafeChecks. Here is an excerpt.

Positive Pay is an automated fraud detection tool offered by the Cash Management Department of most banks. In its simplest form, it is a service that matches the account number, check number and dollar amount of each check presented for payment against a list of checks previously authorized and issued by the company. All three components of the check must match exactly or it will not pay.

The purpose of this system is to help prevent check fraud and the simplicity of it is encouraging. I can only hope that during transmittal they take the time to digitally sign the transactions.

As part of my site re-organization and update, I discovered a new plugin, WP-SmugMug written by Adam Tow, that allows me to show recent photos from my SmugMug account on the site. Previously, the Photos menu item just took you directly to my photos, http://photos.donthorp.net, on SmugMug. Now the link takes you to a local page that displays some recent photos and provides a link to all photos.

I had a couple of small issues with the plugin, version 2.0.3 and WordPress 2.7, but that didn’t stop me from working around it for photos.

1. The “Send to Editor” button didn’t work for me so I had to enter the short code by hand (FireFox 3.0 and Safari on OS X Leopard)
2. When using the RSS feed for recently updated galleries, it didn’t find the gallery images to display so I took that feature out.

This is a just a quick post to note that I’ve finished porting the site to Wordpress 2.7 and taking it into production. I haven’t made any of the organizational changes that I want yet, but now that it’s moved I may post some of the content that I’ve been saving up a lot faster.

If you notice anything wrong with the site, please leave a comment on this post.

I really like my G1, but I’m not really happy with the camera. It’s slow to focus and takes forever to actually snap a picture. I did discover, during the writing of this post, that the camera button is actually a two stage button: Press part way and wait for the green focus light, then press all the way to capture. This technique speeds up the actual photo capture. But it is still slow. I’m hoping that the speed is a software issue that can be fixed with a patch rather than a hardware limitation of the device. That said, this slowness can actually be beneficial in producing artistic effects.

We were out at dinner last night in a reasonably lit restaurant and I tried to snap a photo of Allison sitting across the table. She did her normal hide from the camera move and I ended up with an image that turned out to be great for use as wallpaper on the device.

The image is available for personal use. A screen capture of my phone with the wallpaper is below. When setting the wallpaper, Android let’s you choose a portion of the image.

It turns out that it is not possible to perform on-device screen captures at this time, but it can be done using the DDMS tool that comes with the Android sdk. Reference links are provided below.

Reference Links

• How-to: Capture the screen of an Android device
• Using the Dalvik Debug Monitor Service (DDMS) Tool

A friend sent me this collection of quotes before he headed to the polls.

Thoughts about Obama and Democrats

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
- George Bernard Shaw

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
-G Gordon Liddy

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.
-Thomas Jefferson

Thoughts about McCain and Republicans

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-P.J. O’Rourke, Civil Libertarian

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
-Ronald Reagan (1986)

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
-Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)

Thoughts FOR Libertarians

There is no distinctly Native American criminal class…save Congress.
-Mark Twain

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.
-Edward Langley, Artist (1928 - 1995)

I had several people ask for my impressions of the G1 so I put a video together instead of spending a lot of time typing. In general, it’s pretty good for a first generation device. I don’t really like the bar with the roller obstructing access to the keyboard, but I’m starting to get use to it already.

First Impressions: T-Mobile G1 from Don Thorp on Vimeo.

So my Twitter bud Matt aka mmWine, using his best evil laugh, meme tagged me for “Six Random Facts About Me”. Looking around the Net I see that this meme has been running around for a while and has stayed basically true to form. The main deviation is changing the number of random facts. Since I wanted to be able to get some sleep tonight, I’m very thankful that Matt is passing on the six facts meme and not the 8 facts meme.

Random Facts

Let’s consult “The Book of Don”.

Random Fact #1

As a kid, I usually minded pretty well, but in this case I “bent” the rules a bit. We lived on a ranch in Missouri that had several ponds. One day as I was heading out for some reason mom told me to not get wet. Not sure how she knew I was considering going swimming in the pond, but she must have had an idea. But, I really wanted to see what it was like to swim in early April after the ice had thawed. Solution: Skinny dippin and for the record it was cold, not too bad, but it also gave me the ability to sympathize with George Constanza years later. Oh and I returned home safe and dry.

Random Fact #2

Growing up on a ranch you also need certain skills, one of which is artificially breeding cattle. It’s one of those skills that I don’t think one can ever forget.

Random Fact #3

Laura and I got engaged after our third date. She lived in Amarillo at the time and I was still going to school at TCU. She had graduated a little earlier from TCU. Neither of us knew the other while we were at TCU. So three dates in less than a month and we’re engaged. I can still remember us telling her parents as we were putting up the Christmas tree. First words out of her father’s mouth … “Are you pregnant”.

It’s worked out pretty well, we just had our 21st anniversary.

Random Fact #4

I’ve worked on many different projects over the years but three consumer items that I worked on were.

1. Tandy Sensation the first Windows multimedia PC. Some one even put up a video of an old commercial
2. Tandy VIS a horribly flawed device that we actually made sort of work, but it failed miserably.
3. Gateway Destination PC item #20 towards the bottom of the page. First real attempt to have a converged device in the Den.

Random Fact #5

I’ve been growing my hair out for over 18 months. The story of which will appear in an upcoming blog post. In the spirit of baring oneself, most of the hair is on the sides and back; Not so much contributed from the top of my scalp.

Random Fact #6

Self-funded (read really similar to starving college days) Select Payment Processing, with some friends. It was successfully sold years later.

Tag You’re It

@jmthorp who is my brother and writes http://thorplife.wordpress.com/ after the kids crashed the hard drive on his old site.

John Munsch who has no twitter account, a long time friend, and writes http://www.johnmunsch.com/

@frizzle_fry Melissa Astle who also has no twitter account, whom I’ve worked with for years, never met, and writes http://randommisfires.wordpress.com

@dogwood who writes http://thedogwoodreport.blogspot.com/

@stevesaylor who writes http://stevesaylor.net/

@pprlisa who never writes but should at http://lemloo.wordpress.com/

The Rules

The rules to play are easy …
1. Link to the person who tagged you. Matt Tagged me here.
2. Post the rules on the blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

I look forward to learning about y’all. Tag, you’re it!

For months I’ve had a nagging suspicion and you’ve probably noticed it too: we’re in the midst of a bacon and pumpkin epidemic. It’s not hard to miss given bacon’s dalliances in bacon infused vodka, candied bacon ice cream, and the true heart stopper – chicken fried bacon. Pumpkin is no homebody either; out there galavanting around in pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, pumpkin ravioli, and pumpkin jelly rolls. I’m all for culinary experimentation, but this is a plague of mutated foods that threatens us all.

Look back to the somewhat provocative Reese’s marketing campaign of the 1970s and 1980s where we learned that some things, like chocolate and peanut butter, do belong together. This campaign helped bring about a new world order where people were free to co-mingle ingredients in an understanding environment. Nowhere in the campaign did they suggest there was a license for wholesale promiscuity between all editable items.

I LUV bacon and adore pumpkin; but seriously, some things are not meant to be joined. I’m not trying to discourage experimentation and creativity as I want new culinary delights just like the next guy. Experiment if you dare, but post warnings when it goes wrong, don’t propagate the misfortune by turning it into a recipe and publishing it world-wide. That recipe might appear in some demented marketing company’s campaign: “AS SEEN ON THE INTERNET, foods to torture your tastebuds and upset your stomach”. It’s just not right.

Interventions are a common method of helping people confront their problem. Earlier this week CBS’s ”How I Met Your Mother” had an episode in which the group staged interventions at the drop of a hat. While they almost needed an intervention for interventions, I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t recognize the need for a bacon and pumpkin intervention. Consult the table of Google search results or hop on over to twitter search and you’ll be amazed at how often these items appear. We’re clearly out of control. While I was typing the last 2 sentences, the bacon OR pumpkin search had 6 updates.

Did you noticed that there were 247,000 results for recipes that combine bacon and pumpkin; it’s just not holy. Every year I look forward to Fall and the return of the venerable pumpkin pie. Be creative if you must, alter the spice proportions, change sweeteners, or adjust the flakiness of the crust, but don’t follow Joe and codify desecration of a sacred food. Imagine my horror when I discovered this abomination, “Joe’s Incredible Bacon Pumpkin Pie”. This could be the tip of the iceberg, what’s next; bacon soda?

Don’t just sit there when it’s clear we have a problem. Call your friends. Alert the neighbors. Then let’s gather at Joe’s for the first of many interventions.