1 ramen package
1 meat (optional)
Boiling water
Frying pan with oil

Boil the water. While it is getting up to a boil, open the ramen and take out the flavor packets. Cut the meat into bits at this time so it will be ready to go in. (this is assuming you have an already-cooked meat.)

When the water is boiling, start the skillet or wok with oil to heat on high. You probably want enough oil to cover the bottom of the skillet. (A flat skillet works better than a wok because you want to fry all together in one place, not stirring a lot). Drop a droplet or two of water in the frying pan so you can tell when it gets to boiling (the water droplets will pop – make them really small droplets for this reason.)

The water should be boiling fast at this point. Drop the ramen noodles in. They only need to cook for 20 sec or so. YOu can use this time to drop the meat in the frying skillet, then it will be time to take the noodles off. Drain them as well as you can. Add the flavor packet after draining the noodles so that the flavor doesn’t all wash away, but before the noodles become too dry. This might be too much salt if you are not a salt addict like me so go easy if you don’t like it too salty.

After draining the noodles as much as you can, drop them into the frying pan along with the meat. This should sizzle nicely. Edge the meat out towards the edges of the pan – it doesn’t need cooking, just reheating and a little crisping at the edges. Keep it on high. If you use more oil you will get more crispy noodles though not all of them will get crispy no matter what you do.

This will take a couple to three minutes and you will want to flip once during this process. If the whole mass doesn’t flip all at once, no worries, just move them around so the crispy sides are up, mostly, and go another minute.

Chow down!

Yesterday I bought myself Vietnamese noodle soup on the way home (and something else for M because she doesn’t care for that). Anyway, when I got home, I fumbled while lifting the soup out of the back seat and *sploot* — nice hot red beef stew directly on the back seat.

Argh! I was frustrated at this for two reasons. 1. I wanted to go inside, not spend 25 minutes cleaning the car, and 2. I really wanted that soup! Oh well. I mopped it up with paper towels and napkins. Then I got an old shirt out of the trunk (on its way to be donated, now on its way to the laundry again) and went through a couple of cycles of pouring water on the seat and mopping it up with the shirt. Then I went upstairs and got soapy water and repeated a couple more times. Final step was to spray Febreze on the seat. I went upstairs and made crispy fried ramen noodles with a bit of diced ham.

Amazingly my car didn’t smell like soup in the morning, which I guess is a good sign. Anyway, after work today I went to the same place and got the same soup. Actually it was not as good as I had anticipated, but at least I am now quite full.

OK almost time to turn in I think. Good night.

Anything into Oil is an article in Discover magazine. I am going to be keeping a close eye on this technology. It sounds too good to be true!

The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water.

Just converting all the U.S. agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil annually. (In 2001 the United States imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil.)

I am especially excited to see the possibility of doing something with unusable animal by-products other than recycling it into feed for other animals — that is an especially scary thing.

I need to renumber the machine poly.polyamory.org onto a new network. I decided rather than trying to arrange time when cos and I are both available, I would switch tactics a bit so that both the new and the old IP addresses are active, and then he can do the DNS change at any time. So, I spent some time playing with Netfilter (iptables) getting it to do what I want.
geek info on iptables

Created new user pic: This is one possible way to write Guu-Rei-Gu in Japanese:
遇礼仇 – one who treats his enemies with courtesy
All previous pics still visible here

Posted as a reply in someone else’s journal. Saving for my reference. No this does not have anything to do with my current workplace :)
Continue reading →

OK before I forget, the weekend report. Did some cool work stuff that needed doing. On Saturday I solved a potentially sticky problem that was just found on Friday. Also I brushed the dust off a device that is designed to funnel all syslog messages EVAR to one machine where we can watch them all scroll by.

Sunday was spent mostly looking for laundry rooms, since #1, #2 and #3 were closed, that meant hauling clothes to the other end of the complex. It would have been easier to haul them to my car; had I known all three closest rooms were closed I would have done so.

Went to bed more or less on time. But stayed up late Monday night to upset the balance once again.

Regarding HR 1146, proposed by a gentleman from Texas, concerning ending United States participation in the UN, I have called my representative to express my views. Here is the recipe in case someone else wants to serve a batch as well :)

1. Find representative here: http://www.house.gov/.
2. Call the number.
3. Say “I’m a constituent from ____(city). I would like to ask the congressman to oppose ______(whatever bill). I feel strongly that we should _____(verb).”
4. Say “Can you tell me if the congressman has a position on this issue?”
5. Listen. Say “Thank you.”
6. Hang up.

Playing Bookworm just now. I very carefully lined up the word “LIENHOLDER” but it didn’t recognize it as a word. Sigh. I don’t think I have ever had a 10-letter word. I played LIEN and HOLDER for 2880 points between the two, but playing one long word would have been “fantastic!”

OK time for bed now.

Call allergist make appt
Call car repair make appt
Call tax guy make appt
Call plumber re: toilet

Move charon to new ip
Move poly to new ip
Cancel meer.net