Smallville (Contains Spoilers)

This season is as usual a roller coaster of events for our pal Clark and likewise each episode has it’s ups and downs, but overall I feel like this season is doing pretty well.  The hardest part about the show is knowing once he becomes Superman, it’s pretty much over.  Knowing this, I don’t know that there was really an epic tale telling us how he became the person he is which makes it sound like why even watch the show?

This season has really touched on some of the cooler and more non-realistic points of being Superman like dealing with Doomsday and the Chloe memory wipe.  I’m looking forward to the Legion episode (Jan 15th) because maybe they’ll tell Clark how crazy important he becomes and it will jump start the Superman persona.  On the one hand, Clark still has to learn how to fly.  Knowing this may be the last season, he’s bound to have to do it soon I imagine.  However I’ve read they wrote the script for the last episode with 2 endings in mind: a season finale and a series finale.

Rock Band

Ok I finally started the drum trainer and man, it’s helped immensely.  We had a Rock Band session on Saturday and it got brought up that I was only playing on hard drums when I used to flip between hard/expert.  I only really play drums when we do the get togethers so I was pretty rusty and didn’t want to fail out the band, but then I thought about how unexciting the drumming must have seemed.  So I finally started up the drum trainer.  I beat the fill at 100BPM so I got the 60 and 100 achievements and finished the beat at 60 but am having real problems on some of the beats like tricky kicks.  Anything that alternates hand hits with kicks is just freakishly hard for me where the downbeat is a drum hit and the upbeat is a bass kick.  Of course my red drum head suffers from lack of sensitivity but I discovered on freestyle mode that the problem lies in the center of the pad.  The rim of the pad is super great on sensitivity and this is actually true for all the pads, they all seem more responsive on the edges.  Anyway, I feel like I’m pretty decent on expert up to about a 4 dot difficulty.  Anything more requires true skill, talent, and a drum kit that works 100%.

Website

Between my personal site and other sites I’m seemingly administering, I think I’ve conquered them!  I finally added my flickr feed to the right panel and changed out the twitter updates so it’s not stuck on last week.  I really want to find a nice WordPress template and call this site finished.  The problem is I don’t do main posts very frequently, most of the ideas I have can fit into a twitter posting and likewise interesting things I see go into flickr although that isn’t used as much.  With the current design both twitter and flickr aren’t highlighted and don’t draw the eye in.  I’m sure I’ll come across something sooner or later though.  It would be cool to find a plugin that allowed me to post flickr and twitter as main posts so they sort of all flowed into one.  I imagine these things exist and I’ve just been too lazy to search for them.

Tea Knockoff

I keep adjusting things and keep moving farther and farther away from McAlister’s deliciousness.  What’s worse is that I haven’t gone back in a week and a half so at this point I don’t even remember what it tastes like!  I’ll probably go back in a day just to refresh the palate.

Christmas

My sister sends me a text message saying “Don’t get yourself anything for Chrismas because Mom and I got you something REALLY COOL” which is an odd thing to say since usually my parents get me cash.  So the fact that they went out of their way to get me something has me both excited and nervous.  I mean, it could be like really amazing from the sound of it.  My imagination can’t comprehend what it might be.  A netbook??  A G1? ! An iPhone??!?  New Oakleys?!?!!!?!?!?  OR it could be you know, something for my cats like a cat carrier so I can bring them down to San Antonio.  I mean that would still be cool.  Although secretly, though not anymore, I’ve gotten my Christmas gift to myself and it was a paper shredder!  How sad is it when I don’t get myself anything fun, but get something practical and office-y.  Ah well.  I feel like after this Christmas, the total conversion of my parent’s house will be complete.  I have no idea what they’ll want next year because technology wise they’ll have everything and it’ll be so cool to visit them.

Like usual for Thanksgiving, I’m the designated turkey buyer, so I’ll be bringing that down.  I think I’ll take extended leave which means I’ll probably end up taking my PC down again but I need a cat sitter.  My stints back home have gotten shorter and shorter due to lack of care for the cats which makes the drive more and more irritating when I imagine that a bulk of my time is spent driving.  So I’ll stay longer and enjoy south Texas a bit more this year.  Turns out there’s a McAlister’s down the road from my parent’s house so maybe I can get them addicted to the tea there too!

Switched to feedburner so the new RSS link is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Timothyhanson

I did manage to update the link on the top somehow with this crazy new 2.7 version of WordPress.

Ok if you were following my twitter or talked to me in real life recently, you’re aware that I am in love with McAlister’s tea.  I actually hate tea in general, so to like something in the category of hating things let alone loving it is quite an incredible step.  So after realizing that it’s not cost effective to eat there 4 out of 7 days of the week like I had been, I needed to take steps that allowed me to cut some costs.

In my travels across the net, people have said that McAlister’s tea is actually just Lipton, which according to Hammeron is just insane because Lipton is like the cheapest and not-extravagant kind of tea one can buy.  But I thought I’d give it a whirl.  While at the store though I thought to myself, I know for a fact they brew this stuff, meaning I need some kinda method that allows for easy creation of said tea.  One website suggested just using a coffee machine so I strolled down the coffee machine aisle and found this Mr. Coffee Ice Tea Machine for $15 bucks.  $15 I’m reminded is 3 gallons of McAlister’s tea.

Anyway, machine in hand I went home and tried to make myself some magic.  My first attempt was 2 qt. line worth of water with 2 tea bags on full strength brew!  I poured it, had a sip, then gagged.  I realize that taste is the taste I remember of tea and hence the hatred of it.  So I added sugar and took another sip.  Still gross.  I continued to add sugar until it would no longer dissolve and it was not at all close.  This wasn’t working out so well.

I got some advice from someone at work about tea, and she said that the secret is disolving the sugar in the really hot tea after brewing so it disolves faster.  I read around a bit more and this time I felt like I’d be more sure in this calculation.  I went to the 3 qt line worth of water, switched it to medium brew, and added 2/3rd of a cup of sugar into the container for the hot tea to pour into.  I took a sip, and it’s not McAlister’s tea, but it is drinkable and fairly enjoyable.

So I feel like I’ve come pretty close, but at the same time am disgusted by the amount of sugar I’m using for this.  I wonder how much sugar is in the other stuff I drink though, because maybe 2/3rds of a cup for that amount of water (which I don’t understand because there’s no way that line indicates 3 quarts but then again, the pitcher is really huge) isn’t so much.  At the very least, I spent 17 bucks on probably more tea than I’d buy at McAlister’s so I’ll be alright on this investment I think.  I feel like I should be buying some lemons though to pop in there.

BSH says I oversold the tea though, so maybe it’s not as good as I say it is, but I tend to think so.  Hammeron is going to try it out in a week, I’ll get his reaction.

As is usual tradition, I picked up the turkey and headed down to San Antonio last Wednesday.  I’ve discovered the secret to lasting 6 hours is to actually kill time with podcasts.  Typically I have a random playlist going on while I drive, but I find that listening to a podcast is pretty great.  However, a little ADD creeps in if the podcast runs a bit too long and I have to fight the urge to change tracks.  After so many years of making that 6 hour drive, it’s good I can find new ways to not fall asleep and die at the wheel.  It was getting kinda bad there pre-iPod days.

Fighting the disgust of taking my whole computer to San Antonio, I finally caved and took it for WoW purposes.  I also took Rock Band as well and taking out the need to camp out for Black Friday it was a relaxing Thanksgiving.  Had a nice Thankgsiving lunch, we don’t do dinner, ran an instance, and rocked out.  Strangely, I didn’t do a lot of Rock Band, but my brother and sisters played it quite a bit.

Even though I didn’t camp out for deals, I still went to Best Buy and picked up an 8GB thumb drive and some DVDs.  The 360 wasn’t networked as usual so I couldn’t stream stuff from my PC to the 360.  By the way did you know you can use regular ethernet cables to connect a networked PC to the 360?  Additionally I gambled this would work with my computer, so I wired my laptop to my PC as a wireless card and it worked!  I guess crossover cables are a thing of the past.  Anyway, I got all these DVDs and started burning some flicks to them, but something crazy happened on the first burn which made it unplayable after 2/3rds of the movie.  It was distressing but strangely, I decided to move the movie to my thumb drive and plug it into the 360 and it worked!  So I have a useless spindle of blank DVDs now.  Ah well.

We also went to World Market to pick up some strange and exotic food.  I finally found some panettone bread.  I tried looking last year after the holidays and the stores were dry.  However, I found some among other oddities from Italy and some kind of chocolate log.  The chocolate log tasted familiar, but this odditiy from Italy was a white nougat bar.  It had a foot like aftertaste, but otherwise was good.  The panettone was TOTALLY AWESOME though after heated up a bit.  Man it’s a great sweet bread.  Giada De Laurentiis has some recipe for them which after finally having tried just the bread, can only taste great in my imagination.

The return trip was uneventful but I have noticed a horrible trend at my apartment complex.  I live on a side street on the complex and as such I always parked out on the curb.  I was the only car ever on the curb.  Everyone else parked in the lot.  The street isn’t busy at all so I’m not concerned with the safety or anything of doing such a thing.  However, last month they repaved the lots.  So people were forced out of their spots.  But guess where they’re parking now!  Yes, on the curb, and occasionally right in front of my apartment.  So I get back and there’s no spot for me.  I’m forced to park in the lot which is annoyingly far away compared to the curb.  I don’t even know where half the cars come from!!  There’s only 8 apartments facing that street yet I see all these cars on the curb now that can’t possibly be from the 8 apartments.  Ah well.

I’ve done something bad to the background of the site, as such it’s acting weird when I log in/out of the admin page. Hopefully I can get it fixed up soon.

Fixed!

From GosuGamers
I gotta say, HD quality Youtube videos are pretty awesome now.