Bill Bumgarner

When I read the headline that Geothermal plants are shaking up a California town, I was fully expecting yet another quackery-hits-mainstream-press bit of stupidity. Instead, it appears that there is a connection between geothermal energy production through the use of water injected into the thermal sites and an increase-- significant increase-- in the number of quakes within the region.

I wonder what the geothermal plants do to protect against earthquake damage? In any case: Odd.

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MacDevCenter has an article on Objective-C unit testing using OCUnit. A good read.

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As appeared in the pontifications of my Subversion post: if you just need the Subversion client, Martin Ott (of SubEthaEdit fame) has made statically linked packages available that contain just the client bits. See Martin's weblog to download.

Speaking of SubEthaEdit....

It has been quite a while since an update or any noise in that community. Not that the app doesn't "just work" as is... but, what is up, anyway?

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Food

A few days ago, I made steamed curried brussel sprouts with elephant garlic. Very tasty. Very toxic. Oddly, Janis (Joplin -- my dog) totally digs curried brussel sprouts. Very strange.

I had a few leftover. So, for breakfast I made a scramlet (scrambled omelette) that contained smoked tuna [farmer's market comes through again!], spicy yummy cheese [pepper cheddar of some kind], and curried brussel sprouts. A "throw together whatever I can find" breakfast.

It was surprisingly tasty.

Tomorrow, I'm going to try my hand at Jambalaya with crab, shrimp, and jalapeno-chicken sausage. Should be interesting. Fortunately, I have the exact same cast iron dutch oven as in the 40 year old cookbook. (Fortunate in that I have no idea what I'm doing and am grasping at any correlation between recipe and reality that I can.)

With my wife out of town, I set out to explore the local restaurant scene; something that is not so easy with a 3.5 year old in tow. In particular, I wanted to find a decent Japanese restaurant. And that I did: Furu-Sato has proven to be an excellent dining experience. Very friendly folks-- both working their and as customers-- and the food is excellent. Nice web site, too.

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I was quite amused to note that Return to Dark Castle is now available. I used to play quite a bit of the original Dark Castle on my Mac Plus way back when. RtDC is quite a decent version of the game.

In other gaming news, I picked up a GameCube under the theory that there are a number of games aimed at the younger crowd. I also picked up the Sonic and Zelda anthologies (the first N games of each series). I never played the Zelda series and only a little bit of Sonic.

It surprised me just how bad the original Zelda really was. Now, that is a completely unfair statement because I'm comparing it to everything that was inspired by the original game. The criticism is aimed more at the game play and UI than at the story or gaming concept. To succeed at Zelda, you have to solve "puzzles" where the solution appears to be 100% invisible -- i.e. you have to, say, "burn the 4th tree from the left of the screen 3 north and 4 west and 1 south and 2 east from the start" where there is absolutely no clue anywhere in the game that that is what you need to do.

Zelda II is much better, but still has its moments of "what? huh?".

Thank goodness for FAQs.

Sonic is as Sonic always is; the ultimate ZEN game. That is, to maximize points, you have to just go go go with no regard for what is coming next because you can't see it! But the faster you go (learning the occasional hiccup/exception), the more points you get. Seriously -- Sonic seems to be all about trusting in "the flow" of the level design. And the level design is generally pretty amazing.

It strikes me that Sonic is going to be a whole new-- and spectacular-- gaming experience on a really high resolution large screen where you can see about 10x more of the level than in the original games.