Ever wonder who thought up some of life’s basics? Bread, for example. Who decided to try taking the grain from wheat (or some such plant), grind it to a powder, mix it with yeast, add water to make dough, and then heat it until it was edible? How many poor slobs ended up with major belly aches trying out bad bread recipes? I can’t help but think a bad recipe for bread led to beer. Similar ingredients, and all. “Mein Gott, Hermann, you added way too much water. Maybe if you let it sit for a few weeks it’ll dry out.”

And imagine the fun of being the original wine taster. “Well it was easy, Julius. I just filled a vat with grapes and stomped on them with my filthy feet until the juice ran out. I collected the juice in a barrel and let it rot. Go ahead and give it a try.” 

I’d imagine the first cups of coffee led to a few sleepless nights. And how many leafy plants failed the -cough- test before someone -hack- tried tobacco? (If you’ve never heard Bob Newhart’s tobacco skit, you’ve been missing one of the greatest one-man comedy schticks of all time.)

Ever wonder if there’s still some future staple out there waiting to be discovered? Any taste-test volunteers? 🙂

We went out tonight for a walk around the Panther Trail as mentioned in the previous post. As we drove over to campus, I was thinking, “Should have checked the weather.” It didn’t look too menacing when we started out, but as soon as we hit the halfway point, i.e., the furthest distance from the car, it started to rain. Just lightly at first and we thought it’d be ok. But soon the light rain got heavier and then it turned into a full blown downpour. We were soaked through in minutes and we were still a half mile from the car. By the time we reached the car, it had almost stopped and two minutes later, it did stop. The radar image below shows how tiny the storm was, but it was enough rain to flood the roads and fill the parking lot to about four inches. Lesson learned.

We’ve lived here for 4-1/2 years and one of the things we bemoan about this area is the lack of good places to walk. Our neighborhood is tiny and we’ve worn a path around the new neighborhood next to us. The farmland around us has no trails, nor do the woods. So tonight we decided to drive over to Eastern Illinois University where Sarah works and walk around there. We were just going to walk around a pond near the football stadium when we came across Panther Trail. It’s a several mile long trail that winds around the pond and the southwestern practice fields. Really nice place to walk and there’s plenty of ways to make the walk longer or shorter. It’s well maintained, flat, and generally deserted. We plan on walking there several times per week.

 All these years. Who knew?

We stopped for dinner at the Beef House in Covington, IN on the way home from Indy tonight. Serious steaks here, but the atmosphere of a small town diner. Mostly older folks, although there were, unfortunately, lots of children crying and whining. Sarah got the petit filet and I got the regular one. The difference was maybe 2 ounces, if that. Not worth it for $5 extra. She ordered hers medium and I ordered medium rare. Hers came medium rare and mine was 3 seconds per side shy of raw. Plus it was sliced in half when I got it. I showed it to the waitress and told her I ordered medium rare. She took a quick look and said, “That’s not medium rare” and took it back. So I sat there while Sarah ate (at my behest so hers wouldn’t get cold). When mine finally came out it was better, but having been cut several times and recooked, it just wasn’t right. It says “Voted Indiana’s Best Steakhouse” on the website. What a laugh. Indianapolis has some very high-end steakhouses, any one of which would put this place to shame.On the way out I was amused by a very nice ’72 Cutlass Supreme in the parking lot with super chromed 22′ wheels. It looked like a clown mobile. I was dying for a camera.

We’re getting ready to make our annual summer pilgrimage to New England. Just four days, this time around. Still, it’s the last full week before school starts and only one week after the latest threat to the airlines by the bottom feeders claiming to be God’s warriors. Today I worked overtime trying to catch up and the hurrieder I went the behinder I got. Vacation isn’t really getting away from work, it’s just doing it ahead of time and/or postponing it till later. It just piles up on either end of your time off. In the end, you don’t do less work, you do the same amount of work in fewer, albeit longer, days. On top of work stress comes a worry about what to pack and whether or not to risk taking a laptop. I read today that British Airways is trying to reacquaint 5,000 passengers with their baggage and is looking for 5,000 more bags lost in the mayhem of last week. I wonder how many laptops were lost/stolen/trashed.

On a completely unrelated but equally distressing note, the Red Sox slid further into loserdom tonight. I shouldn’t have expected more, though. If they get swept by the worst team in the league, it only makes sense that they’d get swept by the best team. Still, it’s depressing to watch such a high caliber team give up on themselves. I signed up for MLB.com’s live service just as this losing trend began. And that, my friends, is why I don’t gamble or dabble in the stock market.

Fair is fair. A little over a month ago I was braggin’ on the Red Sox and naively predicted a run to the pennant and beyond. I even signed up for MLB.com’s live service. Since then the Sox have looked like a bunch of frat boys in a sandlot game. At times it’s comical, and at others it’s downright depressing. Last night was the worst. It’s baffling how a team that can put together the win they got that night in June can look so inept now. Much is due to injuries to key players, but it also seems like they’ve lost faith in themselves. The rest of this season may be too painful to watch. But as a New England sports fan, I’m used to the roller coaster ride. The Sox do it, the Patriots do it. So hope lives on. A couple of years ago they were down 3-0 to the Yankmees and things looked utterly hopeless. But Yogi is right, it ain’t over till it’s over.

Our backyard is turning into a regular zoo. Raccoons apparently like bird seed, corn, and even dog biscuits.

I recently finished reading Russell Bourne’s excellent non-fiction work, Cradle of Violence: How Boston’s Waterfront Mobs Ignited The American Revolution. The premise is that the waterfront rowdies and bottom-rung laborers of Boston acted as the tinder and spark which ignited the American Revolution. The commonly accepted rabblerousers such as Sam Adams, John Adams, and John Hancock were more the tenders of the fire, rather than the fuel. They were the users, guiding and cajoling and coercing hard drinking ruffians like Ebenezer Mackintosh into doing “the dirty work.” And well they might, for these tough guys of Boston had more than a century of experience exercising their combined muscle to get what they wanted. But now, more than 200 years later, who remembers Ebenezer Mackintosh? Who knows the names of those hooligans who tossed tea into Boston Harbor? And while the names of the “victims” of the Boston Massacre may be better known, how many people know who those men really were, what they did in their lives before becoming American martyrs? Russell Bourne knows. And his book is not only a fascinating history lesson, it is a very apt and timely modern lesson as well; don’t forget who does the real work, the dirty work, the dangerous work. It’s the little guy.

Draw the blinds.

The following programs, listed in no particular order, all work very well, contain no spyware, and are free. I’ve used all of them extensively and recommend them with no reservations.

Eraser will permanently erase a file or folder. It will overwrite the filespace 35 times with random numbers, making the data stored there virtually unrecoverable. The only caveat I’ve found is using the “Erase all free space” option on the C:\ drive may overwrite or damage NTLDR, which is a critical file on WindowsXP. Therefore, I recommend not using that option. The best facet of Eraser is the ability to right-click on a file and choose Erase. Simple, easy, effective.

Allway Sync is a great folder syncronization program. It will keep a folder or directory on your hard drive exactly sync’d to one on another drive, say an external USB drive or USB thumb drive. You can even set it up so that plugging in a USB thumb drive will activate the program and sync files automatically.

Filezilla is my FTP program of choice. I like the Explorer-like interface and the drag-and-drop usability.

JDiskReport will lay out for you the space used by files and folders on a hard drive. It’s great if you’re trying to figure out where all your hard drive space went.

Beyond Compare is perfect for comparing two directories so you can see where they differ. It makes a pretty good backup system, too. Ok, it’s not totally free, but you get a fully functioning version for 30 days, which is great if you just need to compare directories once or twice.

GAIM is a multi-platform instant messaging client which works with all IM services. It’s handy if you have friends using AOL, MSN, Yahoo, etc who can’t agree on one service.

Google Earth is just plain fun. You can see a map of an area and then flip to an aerial view or combine the two. The folks at Google are constantly updating the capabilities, so it gets better and better.

SDP Downloader allows you to extract video files from direct play links, like the ones in the post below about the space shuttle external fuel tanks. Just copy and paste the link to the website into SDP, and it will grab the video file and allow you to save it on your hard drive.

Rainlender is a very cool desktop calendaring program. I only use it at its basic level, just so I have a current calendar on my desktop. But you can really put its many options to use for a fully functioning calendaring system.

Spambayes is the one of the best client-based spam filters. It can be installed as an Outlook plug-in or used with POP3 or IMAP clients. It learns over time and very quickly becomes an effective spam filtering program.

Active Ports shows you which programs and ports are accessing the network from your PC at that instant. It will also show you the remote IP addresses and ports to which your PC is connected. It allows you to kill any network-using program and uses color coding to differentiate between outgoing and incoming packets.