• 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)

Pantry Essentials

• Breads
  • buns
  • loaves
  • pitas
  • tortillas
• Pasta
  • lasagna
  • spaghetti
  • penne
  • fettuccine
  • macaroni
• Canned beans
  • black
  • kidney
  • refried
  • navy
• Pasta sauces
  • Alfredo
  • pesto
  • spaghetti
• Canned broth
  • beef
  • chicken
  • vegetable
• Peanut butter
• Canned meats
  • chicken
  • salmon
  • tuna
• Pickles and olives
• Canned tomatoes
  • diced
  • seasoned
  • peeled whole
• Rice and rice mixtures
• Cereals
• Salsa and chips
• Coffee and tea
• Salt and pepper
• Cookies and crackers
• Soft drinks and fruit juices
• Herbs and spices
  • garlic powder
  • basil
  • oregano
  • thyme
  • curry
  • allspice
  • cinnamon
  • nutmeg
  • bay leaves
  • ground red pepper
• Soups (canned or dried)
• Jams and jellies
• Soy sauce and marinating sauces
• Ketchup and mustard
• Mayonnaise
• Syrups
  • butterscotch
  • chocolate
  • maple
• Main-dish mixes
• Tomato sauce and tomato paste
• Vegetable oil
  • canola, olive
• Vegetable cooking spray
• Vinegar

Refrigerator Essentials

• Cheeses
  • cheddar
  • cottage
  • Monterey Jack
  • mozzarella
  • Parmesan
• Milk
• Eggs
• Packaged salad greens
• Fruit juice
• Sour cream
• Butter or margarine
• Yogurt

Freezer Essentials

• Ground beef or turkey
• Chicken (boneless skinless breasts)
• Ice cream or frozen yogurt
• Fruit juice concentrate (lemonade and orange)
• Vegetables (packaged)
• Berries (for smoothies and desserts)
• Bread crumbs

Baking Essentials

• Baking cocoa and baking chips
• Chopped nuts
• Cake mix and canned frosting
• Baking mix (Bisquick®)
• Flour
• Baking powder and baking soda
• Sugars
  • brown
  • granulated
  • powdered
  • raw for gourmet coffee
• Brownie mix
• Vanilla and almond extract

Nonfood Kitchen Supplies

• All-purpose spray cleanser
• Paper towels
• Aluminum foil
• Plastic wrap
• Dishwasher detergent and antibacterial hand soap
• Sponges or dish-cloths
• Resealable food-storage bags
• Storage containers
• Toothpicks
• Napkins
• Waxed paper
• Nonabrasive scrubbing pads

Eh, I’m probably just being overly negative. I just want something interesting to read for a change. Come to think of it, can we please do away with the “Top 10…” thing all together? It’s pretty played out and annoying at this point. Just like the overuse of the adjective “quietly” in headlines. Just take a look at Digg or Google News. “Apple quietly intros this…” “Microsoft quietly does that…” Please, stop.

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.

In order to try and salvage a little bit of good humor from the situation, and try to keep our spirits up in the face of whatever may be coming, have a look at this gem I found posted elsewhere on the net. I think back to this and chuckle any time I read a story on gun violence in the news. Just head over to Google News and search for “gunman,” and you’ll find plenty of examples that adhere fervently to the “suggestions” put forth below (albeit satirically). Anyway, here you go:

The Journalist’s Guide to Gun Violence Coverage

Guns are a sad fact of life in American culture and are a major topic in modern journalism. A good Journalist has a duty to get involved and make a difference in this important societal debate. By following certain guidelines, the concerned Journalist can be assured of having the maximum impact on this shameful problem.

The first principle to remember is that subtle use of terminology can covertly influence the reader. Adjectives should be chosen for maximum anti-gun effect. When describing a gun, attach terms like “automatic,” “semi-automatic,” “large caliber,” “deadly,” “high powered,” or “powerful”. Almost any gun can be described by one or more of these terms. More than two guns should be called an “arsenal”.

Try to include the term “assault weapon” if at all possible. This can be combined with any of the terms above for best results. Nobody actually knows what an assault weapon is, so you cannot be criticized for this usage. Your local anti-gun organization can provide you with a list of the latest buzz words like “junk guns,” “Saturday Night Specials,” and “the criminal’s weapon of choice”.

Don’t worry about getting technical details right. Many a reporter has accidentally written about semi-automatic revolvers or committed other minor errors. Since most people know little about guns, this is not a problem. Only the gun nuts will complain and they don’t count. The emotional content of your article is much more important than the factual details, since people are more easily influenced through their emotions than through logic.

Broadcast Journalists should have a file tape showing a machine gun firing on full automatic. Run this video while describing “automatic” weapons used in a crime or confiscated by police. At the least, a large graphic of a handgun should be displayed behind the on-air personality when reading any crime story.

Do not waste words describing criminals who use guns to commit crimes. Instead of calling them burglar, rapist, murderer, or repeat offender, simply use the term “gunman”. This helps the public associate all forms of crime and violence with the possession of guns.

Whenever drug dealers are arrested, guns are usually confiscated by the police. Mention the type and number of guns more prominently than the type and quantity of drugs. Include the number of rounds of ammunition seized, since the number will seem large to those who know little about guns. Obviously, the drug dealers who had the guns should now be called “gunmen”.

Political discussions on gun control legislation usually involve pro-gun organizations. Always refer to these organizations as “the gun lobby”. If space permits, mention how much money the gun lobby has spent to influence political campaigns and describe their legislative lobbying efforts as “arm twisting” or “threats”.

Gun owners must never be seen in a positive light. Do not mention that these misguided individuals may actually be well educated, or have respectable jobs and healthy families. They should be called “gun nuts” if possible or simply gun owners at best. Mention details about their clothing, especially if they are wearing hunting clothes or hats. Mention the simplistic slogans on their bumper stickers to show that their intelligence level is low. Many gun owners drive pickup trucks, hunt and live in rural areas. Use these details to help portray them as ignorant rednecks. Don’t use the word “hunt”. Always say that they “kill” animals.

Don’t be afraid to interview these people, they are harmless even though we don’t portray them that way. Try to solicit comments that can be taken out of context to show them in the worst possible light.

Never question the effectiveness of gun control laws or proposals. Guns are evil and kill people. Removing guns from society can only be good. Nobody really uses guns for legitimate self-defense, especially women or children. Any stories about armed self-defense must be minimized or suppressed.

Be careful about criticizing the police for responding slowly to 911 calls for help. It is best if the public feels like the police can be relied upon to protect them at all times. If people are buying guns to protect their families, you are not doing your job.

Emphasize stories where people kill family members and/or themselves with guns. It is important to make the public feel like they could lose control and start killing at any moment if they have a gun in the house. Any story where a child misuses a gun is front page material.

View every shooting as an event to be exploited. Always include emotional quotes from the victim’s family if possible. If they are not available, the perpetrator’s family will do nicely. The quote must blame the tragedy on the availability of guns. Photos or video of grieving family members are worth a thousand facts. Most people will accept the assertion that guns cause crime. It is much easier than believing that some people deliberately choose to harm others.

Your story should include terms like “tragic” or “preventable” and mention the current toll of gun violence in your city or state. Good reporters always know exactly how many gun deaths have occurred in their area since the first of the year. List two or three previous incidents of gun violence to give the impression of a continuing crime wave.

Little space should be devoted to shootings where criminals kill each other. Although these deaths greatly inflate the annual gun violence numbers, they distract from the basic mission of urging law abiding citizens to give up their guns. Do not dig too deeply into the reasons behind shootings. The fact that a gun was involved is the major point, unless someone under 18 is affected, in which case the child angle is now of equal importance.

Any article about gun violence should include quotes from anti-gun organizations or politicians. One quote should say that we must do something “for the children”. Anti-gun spokespersons should be called “activists” or “advocates”. If your employer wishes to appear unbiased, you can include one token quote from a gun lobby group to show that you are being fair. The anti-gun statements should be accepted as fact. The gun lobby statement can be denigrated by including text like, “according to gun lobbyist Jones.”

Fortunately, statements from anti-gun organizations come in short sound bites that are perfect for generating an emotional response in the reader or viewer. Gun lobby statements usually contain boring facts that are easy to ignore.

Feel secure in your advocacy journalism. The vast majority of your fellow Journalists support your activism. The nation will be a better place when only the police and military have guns. Remember that you are doing it for the children so the end justifies the means.

Eventually, the government will have a monopoly on power. Don’t worry about the right to freedom of the press, just contact me then for more helpful hints.

Professor Michael Brown
School of Journalism, Brady Chair
Vancouver College of Liberal Arts

Political Satire, copyright 1999, Michael Brown. May be reproduced freely in its full and complete form. The author may be contacted at mb@e-z.net

And for another bit of funny, let’s all have a good belly laugh at Carolyn McCarthy’s complete ignorance of things she wishes to legislate:

That’s it for today… tune in next week when I plan to repost the rest of the internet.

• 2 Kings 2:23-24 in KJV, DBY and NAS (Elisha and the bears)
• 1 Kings 18:21-40 in NAB, BBE, WEB and DRB (Elijah and the prophets of Baal)
• Judges 3:12-16 in NAS (Story of Ehud)
• John 3:16 in all available translations

Definitely a great resource, and without the painful load times of other online Bibles. Thanks for the great work, guys.

Banshee

Banshee, in a word, is cool. It’s a great looking program, for one. It’s very feature rich with integrated CD burning, ripping, tag editing, podcasting, Last.fm support, music sharing (via DAAP), music recommendation as well as lots of other nifty plugins. Banshee is also one of the premier applications built with Mono, which makes it even more interesting. The only problems I see here are performance issues. Banshee (especially the search feature) tends to choke on my 18,739 song library. However, Aaron and Gabriel have some very exciting things in store for us that should make slow searching a thing of the past.

Exaile

Exaile is written in Python and aims to be a GTK+ equivalent to Amarok. I’ll be honest… I don’t like Amarok, so It’s probably no surprise that I don’t really care for Exaile, either. It seemed to deal with a large library pretty gracefully and has a lot of nice features like a cover art finder and a large number of plugins. If you like Amarok, but want something that will integrate well with Gnome, give this a shot.

Listen

Listen is truly an amazing piece of software. Its interface is very easy to use, probably the best execution of a “play queue” arrangement I’ve ever seen. It’s ability to dynamically grab cover art, Wikipedia articles and lyrics from the web make it very appealing to metadata junkies. It’ll also integrate somewhat with Last.fm and do some web radio and podcasting stuff. My only complaint is that I’ve had some stability issues, though I’m told they have since been resolved. Definitely give this one a shot.

Quod Libet

I haven’t spent much time with Quod Libet, but the degree to which it can be customized is staggering. You can choose from many different views including the iTunes style paned view or the pictured album list. In the album list, you can customize (with html, apparently) exactly how the albums are listed. The depth in which in utilizes metadata is striking and the included tag editor (Ex Falso) is handy to boot.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is written in C so it’s quick, it doesn’t choke on large libraries, it’s competitive in terms of features and it will actually monitor my music folder and remove songs when I delete them or add the new ones in a sensible manner. One thing it does do that is rather unique is the integrate with the Magnatune and Jamendo online music stores. It’s really just a great all around player. That’s not to say it doesn’t have it’s own little shortcomings, like how it manages to be slightly offensive to the eye, though I can never put my finger on why.

Conclusion

There is a basic feature set shared by pretty much all the players. They’ll all show you cover art (most of them will even find and download it for you), most of them will let you share your music or listen to other people’s shared music via DAAP, they all offer some level of integration with Last.fm, they’ll all provide notifications via libnotify… there are really only a few major differences in terms of features, and even those are rapidly changing due to the fact that most of the players are extensible.

Things are looking pretty good for those of us using the Gnome desktop environment. All of the players we looked at today are feature rich and very usable and give you a lot of room to decide exactly how you want to manage your music. That freedom of choice is exactly what is so special about open source software, and it’s great to see that exemplified in software that we use every day.

So which one do I use? Well, I use Sound Juicer to rip my CDs and I tag and rename all of my music with MusicBrainz PicardQT and do most of my listening with Rhythmbox and burning with Serpentine. I find Rhythmbox’s speed and stability to be the deciding factors (rather than things like integrated ripping and burning), as it’s the player whose search isn’t painfully slow. That could very well change, though, with the upcoming release of the new generation Banshee.

You’ll also notice I didn’t make any mention of iPods. I don’t own an MP3 player, especially not an iPod. I’m a very big believer in open source software and Apple and their iPod are the antithesis of that in every way. If iPod support is important with you, I’d recommend you check the sites for each individual player and see where their support is, but not before you consider picking up a more Linux-friendly player.

Message ends… for now.

Those of us using Gutsy were lucky enough to get a peek at the GIMP 2.4 release candidates during testing. Now that Gutsy is out, and GIMP 2.4.1 has been released, we’re still stuck on that old 2.4.0~rc3 release.

If you want to run the latest version, there are several ways to go about it. You could just download the source and do the standard ./configure --prefix=/usr && make && make install, but then our package management wouldn’t be aware of the new files and we could run into some trouble down the road. But we don’t want to wait for an official .deb (which could come as late as April ‘08), so it looks like we’ll have to make our own. This is actually very easy, here’s what you do…

First off, we need to make a directory in which we can work, and then enter it like so:

mkdir ~/Projects
mkdir ~/Projects/gimp
cd ~/Projects/gimp

If you get an error like “mkdir: cannot create directory `/home/dhayes/Projects’: File exists
“, you can just ignore it. We’re also going to need a couple packages, so let’s make sure they’re installed.

sudo apt-get install fakeroot devscripts

Now, we need to get the source package for the current version of GIMP in Gutsy (which is 2.4.0~rc3). We do that like this…

apt-get source gimp

That command will probably take a while to finish (for me it was about 15 to 20 minutes), so go get a cup of coffee or watch a couple episodes of Squidbillies while you wait. When it finishes, we’re going to need several development libraries to be able to successfully compile the GIMP, and we can use this command to make sure we get everything we need:

sudo apt-get build-dep gimp

You probably have time to watch another episode of Squidbillies while this one is going. Now, once that’s done, we need to get the source code for the new version. We’ll just use wget to download it.

wget ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.4/gimp-2.4.1.tar.bz2

Again, this might take a couple minutes. Once that’s finished, we need to enter the old package’s source directory and tell the system where the new source code is.

cd gimp-2.4.0~rc3
uupdate -u ../gimp-2.4.1.tar.bz2

Once that finishes, we can change to the new package directory.

cd ../gimp-2.4.1

Now, we just have one more tiny little thing to do before we can build the package. The older Ubuntu package contains a patch that fixes a bug which no longer exists in the newer version. Therefore, before we can build the package, we need to remove that older patch. Here’s how we do that:

rm debian/patches/04_ubunut_bug_148380_upstream_fix.patch

Now we just need to build the package.

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

Now just kick back, watch a couple more episodes of Squidbillies and wait for that bad boy to compile. When it finishes, you’ll have some nice shiny new .debs that we can install like so:

cd ..
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

And that’s it! Bask in the goodness of the GIMP 2.4.1!