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Bulgogi marinade

This is a recipe for a Korean bulgogi marinade that comes from Korean Cooking: Explore One of the Orient’s Greatest Culinary Secrets by Hilaire Walden. It’s a cookbook that’s been on my shelf for quite a while now, and has several dishes that I’ve enjoyed making. Not sure how easy it is to get now, but you might get lucky and find one at your favourite used book store. It’s got some great recipes that don’t require special or hard to get ingredients.

  • 4 scallions coarsely chopped (I usually leave these out…not a big fan of onion-y things)
  • 3 garlic cloves, chopped (fresh is best, but the pre-chopped stuff in a jar will do in a pinch)
  • 1 tablespoon crushed toasted sesame seeds (mortar and pestle are great for the crushing part)
  • 3 tablespoons soy sauce (I usually use the low salt version…turns out fine)
  • 2 teaspoons rice wine/dry sherry (I never have any on hand so usually leave it out)
  • 1 tablespoon sesame oil (if you can find toasted sesame seed oil, go with that)
  • 2 tablespoons sugar (I like to use brown sugar)
  • freshly ground pepper (I always forget this)

This should make enough to marinate about a pound or so of your preferred meat/protein product.

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Retiring from the Aquarium

After being a volunteer at the SC Aquarium for nearly 10 years and close to 700 hours, I decided it was time to retire and reclaim some of my weekends.

Being a volunteer there was a lot of fun and immensely rewarding. I got to get up close to a lot of cool birds, handled owls, hawks, an eagle, penguins, parrots and other birds there. The work I did was all behind the scenes stuff, nothing glamorous, but it was enjoyable.

SCAquarium.jpg

I’ll miss seeing the birds every other week, and seeing the other staff and volunteers there. Now I’ll have some more time to work on other things that have been waiting on the sidelines.

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Free National Academies Press publications

Something I rediscovered recently is that almost of the titles in the National Academies Press catalog are now available to read online for free or as a free PDF download.

The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National Academy of Sciences to publish the reports of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative information on important matters in science and health policy. The institutions served by the NAP are unique in their ability to attract leading experts in many fields to join panels and committees charged with providing policy advice on some of the nation’s most pressing scientific, technical, and health-related issues.

There are a great many titles available covering a wide range of scientific topics. The catalog is an interesting place to browse and I’ve already grabbed a handful of publications including some previous BEIR (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation) reports.

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USPS package tracking fails

Until fairly recently (like up until a few months ago), I’ve never had many issues with USPS package tracking. So far this year, USPS has been pretty abysmal with their package tracking.

Slow deliveries I don’t mind so much. It’s USPS, I’m used to them being slow. When I was in Detroit, it didn’t matter where something was being mailed from. It always took a week to get to me. The lack of package tracking updates is what annoys me.

Earlier this year, I was having some items from Etherkit sent to me. USPS tracking showed the shipping label being created, and then nothing for 7 days when it pops up in Ft. Worth, TX. It left there and disappeared for another 5 days before showing up in Columbia SC and finally arriving in my mailbox the next day.

A few months ago, I was waiting on an order from Sparkfun. After taking 2 days to leave Colorado (where Sparkfun lives), it disappeared for 6 days and popped up in Philadelphia. A couple of days later the package finally arrived after bouncing around to a couple of places here.

The latest package we’re waiting for now hasn’t had any tracking updates in 7 days when it was first scanned into the system.

Granted my sample size is pretty small. However, Adafruit, who ships many more packages than I’ll ever receive, has a much larger sample size to work with and has written a few times about USPS’ recent failings

At this rate, I’m pretty much ready to say “Screw USPS” and eat the higher shipping costs for UPS/Fedex for future orders. At least their tracking updates are more reliable.

Update: After 10 days without any updates, the package showed up in Aurora, CO. Totally in the wrong direction. That was a mighty slow truck to take 10 days to go from CT to CO. It left CO, and two days later the tracking showed it in Columbia, SC. Finally, the next day it arrived in our mailbox. 13 days for a “Priority 3-day” package. USPS, you’re totally failing.

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Updated to Fedora 22

Ran the upgrade to Fedora 22 yesterday using the fedup utility. With the Fedora 20->21 upgrade, a –product option was added to fedup to allow the user to select whether to install the Workstation, Server or Cloud version. The latest version of fedup does away with the –product option.

A little over 4200 packages got upgraded on the computer, so the download and install took a while. I let the downloading run overnight, and rebooted to do the install while I was at work. When I came home, a new Fedora 22 login screen was waiting for me.

First thing I discovered upon logging in was that my old KDE 4 Plasma environment was no longer valid, so I had to start off completely fresh with KDE 5. 

The second thing that struck me was KDE 5’s appearance and icons are flat. Solid colours, kind of old school feeling not unlike the icons used in Google’s Material Design.

I also can’t add frequently used application icons to the KDE 5 panel. I don’t know yet if that’s just been done away with or if I have to add a new widget to the panel.

So far most of the changes I’ve noticed are cosmetic. I’ve been mostly just exploring the new KDE 5 desktop and getting things close to what I had before. Then I’ll be able to dive in a little deeper.