Go-o--o-d morning!

I have decided to start each day - ceteris paribus - with an hour of cleaning activity on top of what I/we have been doing to maintain basic hygienic standards. It would appear to be about the only hope I have for getting exercise in what is turning out to be a very sedentary lifestyle.

* * *I spent probably more time that I should have tracking down one last problem with 'zion', which had to do with the curious fact that the machine could talk with the outside world and ping other local machines, but could not browse the local network. The key is to make sure you log in (Drew had some user name of his set up as the default login; I'd been hitting ESC to have it go away, as I didn't have the password). As Windows is generally very good about allowing new users to use machines, this was not a problem.

* * *Virus was a fairly run-of-the-mill sci-fi horror flick. I just can't figure out how Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Sutherland, and a Baldwin-who-is-not-Alex got snookered into starring in the thing, body parts and all.

Watching Stagecoach later on TCN made up for it. It was the movie that earned John Wayne his spurs, if I'm not mistaken, and the film was nominated for a number of Oscars, albeit in the same year as Gone With The Wind. If you look beyond the simple story and stereotypes, the acting is actually pretty good.

* * *The larder is empty, so it's off to the local market for some victuals. I plan to get the fixings for Keith Zimmerman's famous turkey and sausage gumbo (though the ingredient "two bags of gumbo vegetables" kind of have me stumped, unless such a product is sold ready-frozen at the store).

Who knows... maybe I'll even get some translation in today!

Cheers...

It isn't gumbo...

... but it'll do.

Lessons learned:

1. Find a source for filé. If for no other reason, what I made is not gumbo because there is no filé in the as-built recipe.

2. Don't ever use imitation crab meat for anything involving cooking. The meat tends to delaminate into rather strange shapes. Edible, but it does not resemble seafood after prolonged cooking.

3. I think my unburned roux was beginner's luck. That, and scrimping on heat. The recipe calls for medium heat, I had it on the low side of medium. This, in turn, was a Good Thing, as the use of the flat plate scraper from the utensil holder turned out to be a Bad Thing (it melted, which gave me momentary pause as to what, exactly, is in the roux besides the oil and flour).

Ah, well... cooking - like life - is often a Great Experiment.

Cheers...

Yay for Kaspersky...

The urge came over me to use the Kaspersky AntiVirus that I have installed on my VAIO to check the health of zion's files over the network. It turns out there is something called 'explorer.exe' in my Temporary Internet Files folder that has infected the IE5 running on the machine with something called 'Trojan.Win32.Dlder'.

Unfortunately, there was no information available on this puppy at the Kaspersky site, which I found curious, so I dropped them an e-mail. Now, granted, it's about 8 am in Moscow about now, so it may be purely coincidental, but still... I was duly impressed to receive an informed answer to my query within two minutes.

Frankly, I almost didn't open the mail, assuming it was one of those idiotic automated responses that companies send to let you know that, well, they have an automated e-mail response system (it sure as heck can't be to convince you that they care a fig about you or your problem; in my experience too few companies actually do a decent follow-up to their automated responses).

The infecting file in my Internet cache is only 31 kB in size, and I have duly noted the URL of the site that, um, "gave" it to me. Interestingly, I recently made Mozilla the default browser on that system, so while I'm not going to let the intruder rest, I'm also not going to drop what I'm doing (translating) to eradicate the beast.

Cheers...