Starting off our funny pic section… don’t you hate it when you get a bad piece of pumpkin pie?
Author Archives: scottsoapbox
A Recipe Of Sorts
One of the topics i would like to cover on this is site is cooking or more accurately a cook book of sorts. Focusing on great dishes I have discovered in other people’s cooking & things that i have put together myself that deal more with great taste from a bachelor chef…Today’s installment: My own version of rotel dip.
This dish is often compared to rotel dip but it doesn’t actually contain any rotel. So you might call it more of a cross between rotel dip and nacho cheese dip. It is great for dipping with just about any chip. I personally enjoy both rice cakes (the caramel ones are the best) for the sheer amount of cheese dip they can heft to your mouth and reduced fat wheat thins for the hint of sweetness that the wheat thins have. Yes reduced fat – they taste the same and that means you can have more cheese dip. But for the less adventurous any normal dipping chip like Tostitos will do.
Ingredients
Fill bowl about 1/4 full with salsa. Add hot sauce to taste. Add small pieces of Velveeta cheese over the top of salsa. I use the patented Velveeta slicer in a top down motion with two cuts and a cross cut to make 6 pieces out of the typical velveeta slice. Fill bowl to 3/4 full with velveeta. Microwave on med-hi heat for 40-60 seconds to get velveeta slightly melted. Add a small amount of montery jack cheese and mix dip. I use a butter knife to mix the cheese dip because it is easy to scrape the cheese off of on the side of the bowl. Microwave on med-hi for 20-30 and then mix dip again. Continue to microwave and mix until all the cheese has melted. Adjust microwave times for larger size bowls (as these times are for a small bowl) and wimpy microwaves. Once the cheese is melted, mix in milk until cheese appears slightly runny. Cheese dip will thicken as it cools and this will make the cheese dip creamier and prevent it from solidifying.
UPDATE: This post has been moved to dieting section due to the fact that I’ve only come up with on cookbook item in 3 1/2 years…
Shop Class Will Never Be The Same
There is some new saftey technology out that you simply have to see to believe. SawStop Technology monitors the electical conductivity of the the saw blade to by extension determin the electical conductivity of the material being cut through. So what you say? It allows this device to tell the difference between something like oh say wood and your shop teachers fingers. SawStop can make this distinction and stop the blade in 0.005 seconds. Which sounds fast but you have to SEE it to understand how fast.
They have some excellent videos on their site which perilously place a hot dog in harms way to show off the speed of their response. The difference? A small nic and a bandaid or a swift cut and the ability to scare small children for a lifetime with your nub. The video with the table saw is the best as it has to overcome additional obsticales not inherent in the other saws. IE The momentum of the blade and the fact that the wood “drive mechanism” is trying lop its finger off.
Big Fat Killer
A recent report shares some startling news. America’s weight problem is about to become it’s #1 killer (in preventable deaths at least). As soon as 2005 obesity is going to pass cigarette smoking as the favored way for Americans to kill themselves. Which begs the question: is smoking/eating/drinking your way to death simply a slow form of suicide? Does thinking about it in that manner change the basic predisposition for Americans to let other Americans do as they please?
The study showed that America is curtailing smoking (as it becomes more socially unacceptable and frankly harder to find a place where you can smoke) while growing fatter by the minute. This amazes me amid the current low-carb craze that is sweeping the nation.
Causes of preventable deaths in the US in 2000
Source: USA Today; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
| Tobacco Use | 435,000 | |
| Diet/Physical Inactivity | 400,000 | |
| Alcohol Consumption | 85,000 | |
| Motor Vehicle Crashes | 43,000 | |
| Firearms | 29,000 | |
| Sexual Behaviors | 20,000 | |
| Illicit Drugs | 17,000 |
URT 2004 Hurt My Baby
[Aunt Jemima Voice] That’s right officer, it was that nasty ole game came flying off the shelf and smacked the fps right out of my baby! She used to be fast, ya know! Now look at her…. run baby! Oh why won’t you run! [/voice]
Up until about 1:34 am this morning I was extremely proud of my rig:
It was my gaming rig, a Media PC (supplimenting my Tivo), and a video editing workstation…. then URT2004 had to come along and burst my bubble. First let me say the UTR2004 is pretty. It blows the demo out of the water. Turning the settings up to the max @ 1280×1024 res (the max my flat panel supports) it was… AWESOME. I found myself not killing bots in death match so that i could run up to them and enjoy the detail… a far cry from Quake 1 running on my ipaq 4200 where you struggle to pick out the moving blobs from the background blobs.
The painful part is this: while it was really pretty at these settings 15-20 fps just won’t cut it for anything other than going “wow look at that”. So i reverted to 1024×768 (which is actually my normal setting — i spend enough time squinting at small text for work… why do it for fun?) and thought everything was rosy. Well it was in single player mode. The fps would dip to the low 30s but didn’t seem affect my gameplay much. Then I tried to host a game… not a real multiplayer game but one against bots so that I could see what all i could control in setting up a map for real multiplayer play. Ouch. Playing the same map from the demo in onslaught my game kept hanging in order to keep the server going. To prevent this I had to go all the way back to the default settings and 800×600. Sad. My poor baby.
One thing of note though. These painfully slow fps levels did occur w/ 2xAA on. I normally keep AA @ 2x because it is a good compromise between speed and image quality. You can REALLY see a difference between noAA and 2xAA… not so much with 2xAA vs the Higher settings AND 2xAA isn’t a huge performance hit unless you are a 1600×1200, fps is king, kinda guy. I mean until now I never had to turn it off to play any game, but apparently that is no longer the case.
The really sad thing is that all this drove me away from URT2004 (temporarily of course) and over to pricegrabber.com to check prices on a new video card. Not to mention boning up on the latest reviews of said cards to find the new holy grail. And the winner is…… the Radeon 9600 XT. It has the auto overclocking feature that i really like in my MSI 4200, supports DX 9, and has a nice horsepower boost. Now if it could drop in price about $50….