CoffeeBear.net » nasty

Warning: Dannon 7 Benefits All Natural Coffee Yogurt

Mark — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 13:37:09 +0000

When I get up in the morning, one of my first thoughts is usually along the lines of how good that alarm clock would look when smashed into a million pieces. Given this is the case, I tend to sleep as late as I can and still get to work on time. Doing this does not give me a lot of time in the morning for breakfast. I try to make up for this by eating a cup of yogurt as my first breakfast and then later in the morning I get a granola bar as second breakfast.

Additionally, I don’t like to waste money¹ so I tend to buy whatever yogurt is on sale. When I did this Tuesday, the grocery store had Dannon yogurt on sale at 20 cups for $10 or 50¢ a cup. This makes them just barely cheaper than the store brand yogurt. I thought I’d give them a try and picked up 10 cups in a variety of flavors.

Yesterday, I cracked open my first cup of the Dannon yogurt and had selected 7 Benefits All Natural Coffee Yogurt. Once I had the foil cover off the cup of yogurt I knew this was not going to be good. The color of the yogurt reminded me of things I’d blown out of my nose, last time I had a bad sinus infection. For extra unpleasantness, there was a thing layer of oil or maybe water on top. I mixed the yogurt up with my spoon, starting by smashing it straight down into the yogurt. To my mind some of the yogurt should have stuck to the spoon when I lifted it out of the cup. Also, the yogurt should have moved together to fill in the holes where I’d stabbed down into it with my spoon. Alas, neither of these events transpired. Then I did a more traditional mixing² and prepared to take my first bite.

*horrified shudder*

Imagine if you will the worst office coffee you’ve ever had. With extra creamer. Gone all cold and solidified. Now add in an unhealthy dollop of chalkiness and you’ll almost understand what it tasted like. Of course, that’s not the worst part of this story. The worst part is I have another cup of it in my fridge and I’ll be eating it in the next week or so. Yes I know I will hate it, but if I just throw it away then it’s wasting money. *sigh*

¹ Some people would say I’m cheap.
² Swirling the yogurt around in a circular fashion using my spoon.

Warning: Dannon 7 Benefits All Natural Coffee Yogurt © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Quiz Time

Mark — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 23:07:56 +0000

It’s been a bit since I posted any quizzes, so enjoy!

You scored as River Tam. The Fugitive. You are clever and dangerous, which is a nasty combination. The fact you are crazy too just adds to your charm. They did bad things to you, but you know their secrets. They will regret how they made you.

River Tam

75%

Hoban ‘Wash’ Washburne

69%

Zoe Alleyne Washburne

63%

Simon Tam

63%

The Operative

63%

Capt. Mal Reynolds

56%

Inara Serra

56%

Kaylee Frye

56%

Jayne Cobb

44%

Shepherd Derrial Book

38%

Which Serenity character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

You Should Learn Swedish

Fantastisk! You’re laid back about learning a language — and about life in general.
Peaceful, beautiful Sweden is ideal for you… And you won’t even have to speak perfect Swedish to get around!

What Language Should You Learn?

Quiz Time © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Yesterday

Mark — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 16:36:40 +0000

Bah, I’m still a bit torked off about yesterday. At work¹, there’s been a person who keeps sending up emails with the wrong code in the subject line. We use these codes to route the issues to the correct person and putting the wrong code on the email can mean a delay of at least a week before the issue gets looked at. Well, this same idjit² sent an email asking for an update on one of those issues. Since I was running a process at the time; I looked over the issue, found it was mislableled, forwarded it over to the correct person and then spent probably 2 hours writing up a diplomatic response explaining the difference between two of the codes we use.

For a while, the idjit was silent but eventually they sent back an email that was childish & emotional. I responded apologizing for the hurt feelings and reiterated my point about using the proper codes. Then the idjit replied back apparently looking for some way to proove that I was wrong about the idjit’s use of the email code. When I trounced the idjit’s counter argument; they sent back a reply with nothing more than a repetition of the keys points of the original email and a note that none of this discussion was helping the customer. I probably just sat and stared at that for 15 minutes and then spent the next 45 minutes trying to think of a polite response. Eventually, I gave up and forwarded it to the other person who has to deal with these issues to see if she could think of one. So far none has been forth coming and I really want to reply to that email with: “You’re absolutely right. None of this is helping the customer. And you know what else? If you’d sent this up correctly; then the customer’s issue would be one entire week closer to being fixed.” Alas, I don’t think I have it in me to be that cruel, even to an idjit. I came pretty darn close to sending that sort of nasty-gram though as by the end of the day my sinuses were throbbing with the worst sinus heacache that I’ve had in quite some time. I got home and took a bit of Advil Cold & Sinus³. Shortly thereafter, I was feeling better and then Ariesna made me tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches. I washed dinner down with large glasses of orange juice and was feeling pretty alright. So I decided to go ahead with my plans for the evening.

Mind you, those plans were nothing exciting. Well, kind of exciting to me but boring as all get out to my two faithful readers. I’ve been a long time Linux user and for quite a while now; I’ve been running SuSE Linux 9.0 Pro. I’ve been happy with it, particularly since I’d discovered APT and tricked it out a bit beyond the basic install. However, since I’d bought my copy SuSE had released 9.1 and then 9.2. 9.2 runs on the 2.6.x series of Linux kernels and that’s something I’d been wanting to play around⁴. So I’ve been burning my most valuable data to disc and moving other files to my server; so I wouldn’t lose any data during the new install.

Yes, I did say new install. In part, I choose to do a a complete wipe because I have psychological scaring left from my usage of M$ Windows and in part because I’d partially broken something⁵, somewhere in KDE and I wanted to make sure that issue was killed with this new version. Once I was sure everything was backed up; I popped the new install disc in and rebooted.

Oh, I should probably mention that the install disc was a burned copy of the DVD iso; which SuSE released earlier this month. It doesn’t have everything on it that the purchased version does (mostly missing development/server stuff ) but it’s enough to install it and many of the packages without resorting to downloading packages via ftp.

Anyhoo, the installer popped up and I got right into it. Unfortunately, the default new install was trying to partition my hard drive wrong. I’ve got multiple drives in my computer attached to different controllers and then each drive is partitioned to seperate out different things. I.e.
/dev/hda1 is my WinXP install (I likes my Half-Life2 too much to give this up).
/dev/hda2 held my SuSE 9.0’s root mount point
/dev/hda3 was my old /home
/dev/hda4 was the old swap
/dev/hdc is my CD burner/DVD reader
/dev/hdd is my DVD burner

Note for the non-techies: /dev/hda means the first hard drive on the first IDE controller in the system. /dev/hda# indicates a specific partition on that drive.

There’s one other drive in my system connected to a RAID controller on my mobo but none of my Linux installs has been able to see it. Though I heard from a friend that Alan Cox has a patch for the 2.6.x kernel to add support for it. I use that last drive for all the video games that I play under Windows; so I don’t really need to see it under Linux but it would be nice to be able to. Getting back to what I was talking about SuSE 9.2’s default partition setup would have left rewrote /dev/hda3 as the new / mount point, leaving /dev/hda2 umounted (wasting that space). So I reset it to reclaim that space for the new Linux install. Then I went through the package selection to make sure all the apps I wanted would be installed. Though because this isn’t the purchased version; I’m still missing some stuff but that’s what APT is for. :D

The actual install ran for about 25–30 minutes and then I spent the rest of the night copying all my data files back into place and setting up my email⁶. I ended up going to bed; leaving my computer to finish copying all my files back over and I still don’t have everything tweaked just so yet, but I’m getting close. I still need to setup a couple of apps (i.e. Bluefish, BitTorrent, etc…), figure out why SuSE isn’t seeing my iPod (9.0 detected it w/out a problem) and see if YaST still has a tool for forcing my optical drives to use DMA.

¹ This part is going to be somewhat vague as I’m pretty sure our new employment agreement doesn’t allow me to give specifics and in any case, I’m not interested in being fired over making a comment on this site.
² Like an idiot, only not that bright.
³ No, they’re not a sponsor (CB.net doesn’t have any sponsors). This is just the only frickin’ medicine on the market that does anything for my sinus headaches. Every other medicine that has worked for me has been pulled from the market and replaced with “safer” version that doesn’t do jack. *grumpf*
⁴ I’d heard it performs a bit better (but there’s more on that later in the post) and I didn’t feel comfortable trying to compile my own kernel.
⁵ Every time I was opening a new Konqueror window or a native KDE app or trying to open a file from within an app; Konqueror would pop-up an error about some mime type/octet stream being missing. *shrug*
⁶ A big shout out to the KDE developers for making such a wonderful environment. A double, big shout to the Kontact developers for making a great app!

Ju-On

Mark — Fri, 13 Aug 2004 02:19:00 +0000

A couple of months back, Ariesna and I stayed over at Komainu and Aizuchi’s house after a gaming session to watch movies. We watched 1 part of this Ju-On that they’d gotten from God only knows where and it was nasty, evil and slightly scary. Well, now Lions Gate films has released it to theaters here in the U.S. Maybe we should all go out and see it, complete and in English. *shudder* Or maybe not…

USA PATRIOT Act is crap!

Mark — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 17:17:36 +0000

Before this horrid bit of legislation got passed; I was against it because I knew it was only a matter of time until the government was going to abuse it. Then like many people, I got distracted by my own life and forgot about it for a while because nothing was happening with it that affected me. Today, I happened across a link to Ian Spiers’ Brown Equal Terrorist website. The crap that Mr. Spiers had to go through is unfortunately all too believable and to me just proves that the USA PATRIOT Act should have never been passed.

The USA PATRIOT Act is an abusive law that gives the government excessive powers and as should have been expected by our representatives it was abused to harass an innocent U.S. citizen. Why was he harassed? Because there are still petty & shallow minded [insert explictive of your choice here] out there that think if you’re not a good, clean white-boy then you must be up to no-good.

Oh and for the record:

I am a white guy (part Scottish even).
I like to think of myself as an amatuer photographer and have taken courses at my local community college.
I carry a camera with me everywhere I go, but don’t take as many pictures as I’d like because I have nasty suspicions that somebody’s going to get the wrong idea of what I’m doing.