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OK, we had our first snow storm. That means winter is here. Yes, it sucks.
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Well it's almost winter again and I haven't posted any thing for damn near a year. No much new has really happened in the past year so I guess there was really nothing to talk about. However, I got my first Mac about two weeks ago and it's all that I expected. I hardly ever get on my Windows box anymore. I am just now finishing moving my iTunes liburay over and next I will sync my Apple TV with my Mac instead of my Windows computer. About the Mac. It's just a Mac Mini but I did get a good deal on a refurb unit. It's the 2gig dual core with a 120gig hard drive and the super drive. It was suppose to have 1 gig of memory and I thought it was a good deal for $670 but when I looked at the system specs it said it had 2 gig of memory. Jackpot! Anyway, maybe I'll post again before another year passes.
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I fear this is the start of a long, cold winter. Of course for me all winters are long and cold. I don't like winter and I don't like the cold.
Last week there was snow on the mountains and that's OK with me as long as the snow stays in the mountains. But this morning I woke up to snow in my yard. I even had to wear a coat to work this morning.
We will probably get another two weeks of nice weather before the real winter hits. This first snow is just a reminder that summer is really over and it's time to prepare to settle in for the winter.
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It started with a lightning strike and way of in the distance you could see a small plume of smoke. That was around 3:30 PM on the 6th. I got home a little after 4:00 and took some pictures from my house.
First a picture from last spring just for reference.
And now what it looked like about 45 minutes later.
Kody and Jeff went out for a closer look. I think they were nuts for going but they did get some good pictures and video.
And here is the only night time pic that came out worth looking at.
And this is what it looks like today around 10 AM.
As you can see there are still quite a few very large hot spots. You can see all of the pictures here. It's not over yet, the forecast is for more wind and dry thunder storms.
More pictures to come.
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No, No, it's not what you think. I didn't get in trouble or anything, it was Jury Duty. So I call and call the number to see if the case was still on. Of course it was still on so I had to drive to Elko, a two hour drive, hoping I wouldn't get picked for the jury.
So the court room fills up with prospective jurors, the bailiff tells us what to expect and then tells us we can have a few minutes to use the restroom or whatever else we may need to take care of before we get started. After we get back in the court room the judge comes in and basically tells us the same stuff the bailiff said.
Then the court reads the charges, and this sounded really messed up. The bailiff has everyone go out into the hall for about 10 minutes and then come back in. At that time the bailiff tells all of the prospective jurors that the charges that were read were incorrect and the case will be scheduled for a later date. We all were excused, with pay. Then they paid me $80 for my trouble. Cool!
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Facts are seamless tiles that can be use as wallpapers, or textures for graphics. This inspiration for the Facts came from a Linux user who created seamless wallpapers called "Propaganda", and so I call mine the "Facts". I wish I could find a link to his site (if it's still up). I use them to create my wallpapers called "Fiction".
Any way, I just finished Facts Number 4.
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Joe Turcotte, my step dad, passed away on Tuesday.
Joseph Turcotte age 86 of Gooding died Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at Gooding County Memorial Hospital.
Joe was born January 22, 1921 in Lawrence, Mass. the son of Lucien and Cora Belanger Turcotte. He Grew up and attended schools in Mass. prior to enlisting in the U.S. Air Force where he served during W.W.II.
Upon his discharge from th military he returned to Mass. and it was in Methuen, Mass. that he married Cecile Levesque. He was employed as a stationary steam engineer for many years prior to his retirement in the mid 1980's. He moved to the area in 1987.
Joe was preceded in death by his wife, Cecile in 1998. It was on October 14th, 1989 that he married Nadine Young in Gooding, Idaho.
Survivors include his wife; Nadine of Gooding, two sons; Rene A. Turcotte of Hampstead, New Hampshire and Paul Turcotte of Glenns Ferry, Idaho, tow daughters, Gloria Turcotte of Phoenix, Arizona and Dorothy Brock of Ontario, Oregon. Step-children, Robert Young of Gooding, Idaho, Joe Young of Castleford, Idaho, Jeff Young of Jackpot, Nevada, Mary Molesworth of Gooding, Idaho and Kathi Kimball of Shoshone, Idaho; 5 grandsons and 17 step-grandchildren and several great grandchildren.
Joe was laid to rest on June 2nd, 2007.
We will miss you.
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It looks like I will be going to the IGT Users Conference again this year. This year it's on September 10th, 11th, and 12th at The Mirage. I've never been to The Mirage so I do get to see something new.
Last year they promised a lot to us users, some of which have not been fulfilled. It will be interesting to hear their reasons why and the new sales pitches to get us to buy their new and upcoming stuff. Last year it seemed like they were just smoothing over problems they have had in customer support and product quality in order to get us to buy into their new offerings. I would guess this year wont be much different.
In all fairness, they are getting better.
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I was never big on blogs but it seems everyone and their pet monkey is doing it so I guess I will jump on the blog bandwagon. The only point to this post is to kick off my personal blog. My only goal right now is to post at least once a week.
Wish me luck.
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I found this over on Ars. It was put together by DemonYoshi .
From Yoshi himself:
I was off work yesterday and decided to try a new baguette recipe (from the King Arthur book), and did my best to document the process for Ars.
Step 1 was making the poolish. Poolish being a small amount of flour, water, and yeast left to ferment (for 14 hours in this case) so it can add flavor to the final bread. I didn't get a picture of this but got a picture of the ripe poolish.
Step 2 Was to measure out the ingredients for the rest of the dough. By weight as the recipe requested.
Step 3 I mixed the poolish and the rest of the ingredients together. It started out like:
Then when I left it to autolyse it looked like this:
Step 4 With the autolyse completed, I kneaded the dough some. And left it to rise, ending up like this.
Step 5 After letting the dough rise for about 2.5 hours with two folds in there somewhere, I divided it into three pieces:
Then I loosely shaped the three pieces and left them to rest so they'd be easier to shape later.
Step 6 Time to shape the pieces of dough. The first one got shaped into a mini-boule, sort of, and put in a cloth in a bowl to rise.
The second and third were shaped into baguettes.
Step 7 Time to slash the loaves, for looks and to let the dough expand more. The mini-boule got kind of a messy x shaped slash.
The first baguette got slashed, also a bit messily.
The second one got cut into an epi, a wheat ear type shape.
Step 8 Finally, time to bake. I preheated the oven with pizza stone at 500 for about 30 minutes, adding a cast iron pan part way through. Right before the loaves got added I microwaved a bit of water to almost boiling to pour into the cast iron pan and generate steam. I loaded the epi and baguette in, but didn't quite make room for the mini-boule so it had to sit out for a bit until the steam had dissipated. Anyway, the baguette turned out like:
The mini-boule like:
And the epi like this:
Step 9 After that I cut some of the baguette into thin little slices, and threw together some smoked provolone and bianco sardo. Topped both the cheese and the bread slices with a bit of basil, and stuck it in the oven. The slices came out wonderfully crispy and the cheese was perfectly melted and great.
Hope you had fun reading it, I had fun making and eating it 
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So I got to work this morning and was greeted by Kody asking an interesting question.
What's an iPod?
Her husband got her a 30gig iPod for Christmas and she has no idea what it is, and she's pissed. I told her if she didn't want it I would shure take it off of her hands. Of course, everyone in the office had the same response. We tried to explain to her what an iPod is and what you can do with it but she still says she would rather have a new cell phone or a Micky Mouse Watch.
I hope I get an iPod for Christmas
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Wednesday:
This is the day Tom came to the show. We spent some time looking at Gasser chairs for the pit. These are the top of the line chairs and have some really nice features. Yeah, that's right, chairs with features.
Next we went to the IGT booth. We spent a lot of time there, not because we was looking at stuff but because Tom knew a lot of the people there and we just visited a lot.
Next stop was the WMS booth. They had the most innovative slot machines on the floor. The most interesting was the Monopoly game that was a 5 reel, or a 3 reel, or a LCD touch screen, or both reel and touch screen at the same time. You have to see it to really understand how it works. It was truly amazing, but not available for another 9 to 12 months, bummer.
Bally had some really nice site down games. I call them sit down games because they are not slant tops but you sit at them like a slant top. They are out of the question because we cannot get any service from Bally here.
Now it's party time again. The first party Wednesday night was the Paltronics party at TAO. This was by far the best party of the week. The restrooms were the strangest I have ever seen. In the men's they had small LCD monitors above every urinal showing anomie cartoons. The womens had full glass doors that you could see through from the outside, but as soon as the door was locked from the inside the glass would fog over.
The next party was Raving party at the Tuscany. I think all these guys to is party, talk, and smoke cigars. And of course Steve Browne was doing most of the talking.
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We got back around 4:00PM on Friday. We took the long way home because we thought we would take the scenic route through Caliente. It was pretty but damn that was a long drive. I think from now on we'll take the shorter route up 318.
G2E officially started at 7:00 PM on Monday at the Wynn. This was the G2E opening party and started with a long line to get in. It was nice that they had servers walking up and down the line handing out glasses of wine. After about 10 minutes of waiting and drinking wine we made it in to the ballroom where The Dukes of Dixieland was playing. There was lots and lots of food, good food, really good food.
We left the Wynn and walked over to Treasure Island in the Tangerine/Social House where Aristocrat had their party. It was two floors of standing room only and loud music. I thought the food was terrible but they has sushi and Patty likes sushi so the food was good for here. We talked to our sales rep and then got the hell out of there and went back to our room.
Tuesday, the 14th, we get to the show around 11:00 to get our badge holders so we can get into the show. Right at noon the show starts and there's big line going into the front door. I'm not going to go into every little detail about the floor, just the stuff I thought was cool. First place I went was the Paltronics booth where I learned we don't need an expensive media server to display live content on our LCDs. We just need an OSK with a video input. This will let us do some pretty cool stuff with overlaying sporting events on top of our own ads. Also I can display web content on the LCDs. And the cost will be around 7% of the cost of the full system. Next we ran into Steve Browne from Raving Consulting. This is the only man I know who never concludes a conversation.
The first party Tuesday night was the IGT party at PURE in Caesar's Palace. Again the lines were long, the music was loud and there was way to many people for the size of the club, and the club was huge. So, we went to the second party that night, the WMS party at The House of Blues at Mandalay Bay. The band was Cowboy Mouth and they were loud but at least they were a good loud. They had a good tone but I really didn't care for the music they were playing. It was a long day so we went back to our room.
I will try to finish this with a part two after I get caught up with some work.
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