davehayes.org

Finding $8 in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn since March, and using that $8 to buy apple cider.

Seems like every day after lunch, I can barely keep myself awake. I’m sitting here staring at a spreadsheet in Gnumeric and I keep pulling that whole bobble-head maneuver over and over again. Surely there is some way to keep this from happening every stinking day… then again, maybe the Mexicans have it right with that whole siesta thing. Somehow, though, I don’t think my boss would go for that.

The other night, after being confronted with a refrigerator full of nothing but beer and condiments, I was trying to plan a trip to the grocery store. For me, this is typically a very haphazard thing and occurs in one of about three distinct situations. Usually, I’m either:

• Broke and trying to save money by eating frozen burritos and oatmeal for a week
• Shopping for a specific recipe (my Christmas Cheeseball of Awesomeness, for example)
• Or I have some type of craving.

But recently I’ve become somewhat interested in keeping a stocked kitchen. This happened for a variety of reasons, which I won’t detail here, but there was a problem. I knew the limited subset of items I liked to have around, but past that… I had no idea what a well stocked kitchen could contain. Enter my mother, who in her infinite wisdom and forethought gave me a (very complete and thorough) Betty Crocker cookbook when I moved out of her house. The specific cookbook I own details the items that should be present in a well stocked kitchen (it is by no means exhaustive, but it is pretty thorough, as you’ll see).

Using this as a basis, I dragged Jon to the grocery store to help me fill out the list. It was quite a lot, if I’m honest. Probably $150 worth of food which I subsequently had trouble cramming into the meager cabinet space of my apartment. This was great… I had things around and could make whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted without having to leave the apartment. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long.

I had reached a point where the things I had left weren’t really usable without something else. Rather than make a trip to the grocery store, I’d usually just go pick something up from a local restaurant or even do without on occasion. For whatever reason, the other night, I decided it was time to restock. Remembering what a chore it was to copy down the entire shopping list from my cookbook, I decided to make an electronic copy so that I could print one out whenever needed, cross off what I already have and head to the store to get the rest.

This, as you may guess, was slightly tedious and time consuming. But, I did it and I think it’s pretty useful so I thought I’d share it with you. It’s just a generic list of things you’d likely want to keep around, and I hope you find it useful. There’s both a 3 column PDF that’s perfect for printing out and carrying with you to the store and a plain html list (after the break, hit the “read” link down there) that you can copy and paste into whatever you intend to use.

Dave’s Butt-kicking Grocery Shopping List (PDF)

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Over the past couple weeks I’ve been working on a song. Not one of my own, mind you, so no reason to get excited or anything, but it was interesting nonetheless. Jon recorded a band a while back (I’ll refrain from naming them here, but they sound kind of like a mix between AC/DC and the Toadies… with more sexual innuendo, if that’s possible) and asked me if I’d do a completely stereotypical and distasteful dance remix of one of the songs. I’d love to!

See, I haven’t really worked on music much lately. I got burned out on it pretty bad after I moved to Nashville, and it wasn’t really enjoyable for a long time. I’ve worked on a few little things, mostly tuning vocals for a song here and there, but nothing really big. In the midst of this gigantic hiatus, some interesting things have happened. Namely, the release of REAPER. Ever since I heard about it, I’ve been dying to get the chance to do some real work with it. This remix was perfect for finally getting to dig in and start learning some of the nuts and bolts.

The workstation I’m using is an Athlon FX62, 2GB of RAM… it normally runs Ubuntu Linux and works as a home theater PC. But, for working with REAPER, I needed Windows. Thankfully, some months ago when I set the computer up, I had enough foresight to know I would want to do this and installed Windows Vista. Now, Vista was not my first choice. I wanted to install Windows XP. Unfortunately, Windows XP needs a driver floppy for my SATA controller. Not only do I not have the driver floppy for it, I don’t have the floppy drive to put it in. So, XP thinks I don’t have any hard drives. That leaves me with Windows Vista. And really, it wasn’t that bad. I used it to play through Call of Duty 4 (which, incidentally, is the greatest game ever in the history of everything) and a few other things aside from playing around with REAPER.

Fast forward to last week, when I started working on the remix. I was having fun, learning my way around REAPER, exercising some musical creativity and whatnot. Everything was good. Until yesterday that is. Yesterday, Jon came over to hang out while I finished the track up (I was going to turn it in today). As it turns out, Microsoft pushed out an update for Vista that locked my computer into an endless cycle of reboots. Turn the computer on, it says something like “Installing updates state 3 of 3 0%” or something and then reboots. Microsoft have not offered a fix other than to reinstall Windows. How ridiculous is that? They pushed out an official update that kills who knows how many thousands of people’s computers and essentially all they can say is, “Oops.” Needless to say, the song wasn’t finished. I haven’t quite decided what to do with the 45GB of new hard drive space I have now that I obliterated that Vista partition. Maybe you have some suggestions.

I’ve always had a distaste for Microsoft products, but I would use them as a necessary evil to partake of some of my favorite software… things like REAPER and CoD4. But, not anymore. I’ll just run REAPER in Wine from now on and if I want to play games, I’ll buy a PS3 or a Wii. Microsoft will not be getting any more of my money.

There’s also a Yahoo News article on my issue if you’d like to read a little bit more about it.

Here are the goods thus far:

Message ends… for now.