A carnival of technology

I’ve been baking a lot of bread lately. My first loaf was a disaster, but I think I’ve mastered the terrible secret and have been able to make some bread that was pretty alright. Baking bread has opened up some new problems. I needed a bread knife, of course, since it doesn’t come out of the oven sliced, and I needed to figure out where to get some yeast. Apparently it’s next to the flour in the store. It took me a while to figure that out. I figured it would be refrigerated, since it’s alive and all. I think my mom kept yeast in the fridge. That threw me off. I’d like to try a sourdough bread, though I’m not sure how I feel about letting things rot intentionally.

The bread is also exacerbating my problem of having too much homemade food around. I know I can freeze it, but I won’t; I don’t really want to go into it. I need to find a girlfriend to eat all the crap I cook. If any of you ladies out there like food, I’m available.

I bought my copy of Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s pretty thick. About this thick:

I’d like to think that I have some little bit of patience. I enjoy long movies. I even own copies of some bladder-busters like Lawrence of Arabia and Ben Hur. Sure, they have intermissions, and I can pause them, but they still constitute four-hour long thoughts that require a certain attention span in order to follow and appreciate them. I’ve read long collections of books, like Lord of the Rings and the Dune series, but the splits between those volumes seems to offer a sort of reprieve not available in single tomes. The longest single book I’ve ever read was actually V. 775 pages is a whole mess of pages. The great reading challenge starts on Tuesday.

My various attempts to read on the bus in the mornings have failed for a number of reasons, but I still try to get in some reading once in a while. Currently I’m working on Player Piano, Vonnegut’s first book, which I picked up after I heard of his death. I’ve read it before, and I figure that the day I can read that book without becoming totally depressed is the day I’ve completely stopped caring about humanity. It’s a pretty good book.

Apparently beets can make you piss red. I made some beet soup last night, and man, did I have a scare this morning.

I finally ditched that Peachtree Linux (popular in Scandinavia) thing and installed a Linux distribution that sees some maintenance once in a while. I installed Fedora core whatever’s latest, and it seems pretty alright. The music player is the main thing that’s been giving me trouble. I can’t seem to get tracks in playlists loaded in order even if the tracks have track number tags. I don’t get it, but I don’t care a whole lot, either.