For XKCD fans who aren't already aware of it, xkcdsw (xkcdsw.com) is one of the best things ever. Possibly especially at two in the morning.

Also, I'm mostly on Twitter these days, but to avoid redundancy am declining to ship it to LJ (I do ship it to Facebook). So ... I made a syndicated account from the RSS feed: relsqui_twitter. If anyone else would like to do this but doesn't have a paid account, let me know your Twitter username and desired LJ username and I can set it up for you.

The San Francisco #xkcd meetup yesterday was a huge success. I don't have time to write about the whole thing, but by request, here's how to make the mac & cheese casserole I made for it. I feel like most of the recipes I've posted have been pasta-and-cheese related, but I promise this is the best one so far.

0) You will need: A casserole dish and enough pasta to fill it (I used one of those huge bags of elbow macaroni, which was way too much), semisoft and hard cheeses you like (e.g. cheddar, jack, mozzarella, romano, asiago, parmesan), onion, bell pepper, butter, flour, milk.

0.5) Things I didn't use that would have been really good in it too: more veggies (sautee with the onion and pepper), garlic (mince and put in the sauce), hot dogs (chop and toss in with the pasta before baking), bacon (cook crispy and toss in with the pasta before baking).

1) Start cooking the pasta. Take care of that in between the rest of the steps, rinsing it in cold water and leaving it to drain at the end.

2) While the water is coming to a boil, dice up some onion and red bell pepper--I used half of one of each. Sautee them together, onion first and pepper a couple minutes later. Don't do this for too long! They're going to get cooked some more later. You could add all sorts of other tasty stuff at this point, but that's what I had. Set those aside. They'll get cold, but that's fine. If you're adding bacon, cook that now too.

3) In a small saucepan, melt a few tablespoons of butter over low heat. I fucked this up the first time and burned it; don't do that. Add the same volume of flour and whisk until there are no lumps. At some point around now you should start preheating the oven to 350.

4) Slowly add milk, stirring to keep it nice and smooth. You can turn the heat up a little at this point to keep it warm. (Strictly speaking you're supposed to have scalded the milk, but I didn't know that, so I didn't.) I think I probably ended up with threeish cups of milk, but I added some of it later. If you're adding garlic, do that now.

5) Add a couple big handfuls of semisoft cheese and most of the hard cheese, reserving some for step 7. Don't be shy; this is the tasty part. You can always add more milk if it gets too sticky. Keep stirring as it melts. Taste occasionally. Consider adding a little pepper; I didn't, but I bet it would be good. When the sauce is thick and cheesy, turn the heat off.

6) The pasta should be long done at this point. Dump it back in the pot. (You could use the casserole dish for this if you wanted to, but I wouldn't.) Pour the sauce over it and put in the veggies you set aside before. Fold everything together. Be thorough! Don't miss the pasta stuck to the corners of the pot. This takes a little longer than you might think. If you're using bacon or hot dog, add those now.

7) Pour the pasta, now saucy and vegetabled, into the casserole dish. Sprinkle the rest of the hard cheese on top. You want it to cover the whole thing, but not be too thick. Stick that on the middle rack of the oven (you did preheat the oven, right?) for about half an hour, then turn on the broiler for another five to ten. Keep an eye on it. The line between "golden brown" and "burned" goes by quickly.

8) For the love of god let it cool for a while! You will be very sad if you try and eat this soon after it comes out. But after that, enjoy! My dish's worth served six, but I had a bunch left over that I haven't baked yet. Given that it's already fully cooked, you can eat it microwaved or even cold, but baking it makes it tastier.

If those sets don't intersect, you're doing it wrong.

Lately my days have become a vague blur of lounging around playing/watching video games/anime/movies, late-night dinners with friends, impromptu lunches in Palo Alto because I can, sex, making buttons, snuggling, and walking home through the gourmet ghetto thinking about how goddamned lucky I am. I don't know if it's tempered by sympathy for or heightened by the contrast with all my friends who are stressing out about finals and papers and theses right now--friends, I feel for you, but am glad I'm not in your shoes.

I was quite broke for a while, but an old debt came in followed shortly by a larger-than-usual paycheck and a big button order, and I'm about half done with a subcontracting job from zigdon that'll bring in a little more. So now I'm merely poor, not broke, but content with this; I don't have a lot of expenses.

I did splurge a little on a sneaky thing which will eventually be for destinynova, but will not be ready for about another week. I invite you to join me in teasing him about not knowing what it is. (If YOU want to know, by all means ask. Just, obviously don't tell him.)

I'm not positive, but since she introduced me to it, I can only assume it was anarchodandyist about six usernames ago. So, yes, kind of.

I gotta say I'm pleased that this took me literally just about ten minutes to assemble, starting with pen and index card. <3 the GIMP.

I love the Exploratorium.

My life lately has been mostly spending comfortable time with two very nice boys, separately and together, interrupted from time to time by work or sleep or other socializing. I've come off the high of the past week--or at least, I felt that I had this morning, but I was kind of tired and gray--and feel a bit more settled and content. I've been cooking more. Also had a lovely dinner out with Puppet yesterday. He gave me what I didn't realize until it was happening was my first full-body massage the other day. Why did it never occur to me how good it would feel to have my legs rubbed? We have confirmed that I am very pressure-sensitive, which is a nice way to say that I'm a huge wuss about massages. The prevailing theory at the moment is that I'm just naturally pretty relaxed and so you just don't have to push as deep into my muscles for me to feel it. No knots to speak of.

My laptop's power supply is dead. This is irksome. I've heard that Asus's return system takes forever and given how sketchy their site is I believe it. But replacing it on my own costs a bunch of money I don't have. We shall see. I have patience. And, still, Plague. That is, the laptop. Not the flu.

Our potluck last Sunday was rained out, so we took the food we'd prepared and called our friends and had our own potluck, which was great. Baked pasta and onion salad and bread pudding and wine. I wasn't totally satisfied with how I made the pasta, so I tried again today and did it a bit differently--instead of just melting the cheese with the pasta, I actually made a bechamel and put the cheese in it. Also sauteed a red bell pepper, a quarter of a sweet red onion, and a few scallions, and folded those in with the sauce. It came out pretty delicious although still not quite right. Good macaroni and cheese casserole is one of my favorite things so I am determined to figure out how to do it really well.

As I said, cooking more lately. I blame the boy. He's a good influence. Dan and I have noted that he has the top two things on our list of hot qualities in straight men: the abilities to dance and cook. Um. Separately. Not necessarily at the same time.

Sleep now; Exploratorium with centaur et al tomorrow. I have no money but admission is free! First Wednesday. Life is good.

Poll #1392515 vi and screen
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Which one did you learn to use first?

Courtesy centaur, this made me smile so much:

15 Reasons Mr. Rogers Was the Best Neighbor Ever

Here's a sample:

According to a TV Guide piece on him, Fred Rogers drove a plain old Impala for years. One day, however, the car was stolen from the street near the TV station. When Rogers filed a police report, the story was picked up by every newspaper, radio and media outlet around town. Amazingly, within 48 hours the car was left in the exact spot where it was taken from, with an apology on the dashboard. It read, “If we’d known it was yours, we never would have taken it.”

Planet and Climber Buttons

Bug Buttons

Last time I posted about this kind of thing everyone in the world got pissy at me, but I haven't learned my lesson so I'll post another one. Here's an email I just sent via Craigslist's contact form.

Clicking on the "t-shirts" link on the front page, I browsed the designs and was startled to find at the bottom the one which says "Craigslist should have a weight limit."

Really? Is it the official policy of CL that fat users aren't wanted? Or is that attitude just being quietly condoned?

I didn't feel any need to elaborate more than that--either they'll agree with me immediately and the design will disappear, or I'll have to stop liking CL, which would be a darn shame.

Poll #1363377
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

How and when did you learn regular expressions?

< relsqui> I AM A GENIUS
< relsqui> okay so you guys may remember
< relsqui> from way back when
< relsqui> me talking about how I totally suck at taking care of piercings
* toast remembers
< relsqui> and mine keep getting all sore and stuff and it sucks
< relsqui> part of the problem is that it's really hard to soak earlobes
< relsqui> holding an earlobe in a cup is really uncomfortable
< relsqui> and you can hold up a soaked cotton ball or something
< relsqui> but that uses one of my hands
< relsqui> and then I can't type, and I type a lot, so I put it off
< relsqui> soooo
< relsqui> I took a li'l sandwich bag
< relsqui> cut it in two
< relsqui> so I have one of the bottom corners in each half
< relsqui> tied them up so they fit my ears
< relsqui> soaked a bit of paper towel in the hot salt solution
< relsqui> stuck 'em in there
< relsqui> put the bag-corners on my ears
< relsqui> and I have a headband on to hold them in place although they don't really need it
< toast> haha nice
< relsqui> they're dripping and I look RIDICULOUS but my ears are getting soaked and my hands are free
< relsqui> I am BRILLIANT
< relsqui> 8)

yourfonts.com -- free handwriting font generator. Requires a printer and a scanner, unless you have a tablet or can write passably with a mouse, in which case you need neither.

Edit: Of course, no law says you actually have to write English letters on the form.

I've been good to myself lately. I had a nice day out ...



... and then I bought myself a present.

No pictures of that yet. It will arrive tomorrow.

Okay, so. Back when I was at Cabrillo, I got financial aid, specifically a Pell Grant (RIP Pell) to cover tuition, books, etc. In practice, the actual check went into the apartment deposit, but that was just a timing issue and it comes out the same. Anyway, I didn't end up finishing that particular semester, and after a little while I got a letter from the Department of Education saying "So, uh. You seem to have only needed such-and-such a fraction of the money we gave you. Can we have some of it back?"

Fair enough, but I didn't actually have it to give them, so I set it aside to deal with later. The "later" when I had that much money sitting around never came, of course, so it just kind of sat around as a black mark on my credit history.

When I did my taxes last year, I received no refund. This was a little puzzling until I got a note saying "Hey, you owe us money, so we're taking it out of this." Oh, fair enough, again, but kind of a bummer. I'd only worked about a month in 2007 so it only offset a little piece of the debt, but I figured that if they had a way of getting it back automatically I was happy to let them do it and not worry about seeking them out (since I still couldn't really afford it).

So this year, we got our W-2s a week before the end of January and I filed online that night. (Yeah, my taxes are simple to deal with, but if yours aren't I'd probably trade you the convenience for the income.) I signed up for direct deposit, checked the schedule, and found that the payment should show up on February 6th. Since then I've been psyching myself up to the idea of not actually getting any money back. I couldn't remember how much the debt had been, and while I thought it wasn't any more than half of my expected refund, I didn't want to get disappointed.

For dramatic effect, I got paid (as in normal paycheck) on Thursday and deposited it yesterday, so it cleared overnight ...

... and I woke up this morning to find MORE DIGITS than I was used to in my checking account balance. Yes, I actually own an order of magnitude more money than I expected to today. I am hopping with joy. Well, I am paying off my credit card balance, putting a chunk of it in savings, and thinking about finally getting out of my stupid two-cell-phone situation that I'm in. But around that I'm hopping for joy.

Even though it's all or almost all going to practical things, it is glorious being able to take care of all those practical things. I have, honestly, only had this much money around once before--and that was right after the Pell grant came in. This is the first time I've had that much money around and EARNED it. :)

The squishy bits go to science, the bones go to art.

Got my seven people for the meme in the previous post. Now what the heck am I going to make for them? And can I find more than seven people to tag back so I come out ahead? ; )

Also, I want to particularly direct people's attention to altoone, because a) she doesn't know a lot of people on LJ, and b) she makes Really Cool Things(tm). Seriously, I can vouch. So y'all should go tag her post on this.