Dujodu Blog

As anyone who has ever talked to me about gaming knows, I’m a PC gamer. I haven’t owned or even considered owning a console since Nintendo 64. I will be the first to make cheap shots about console gaming and offer up numerous reasons why I prefer PC gaming - almost as much as I will go out of my way to bash macintosh computers (oooh yeah, gimmie another tally for that one). When I first caught sight of the new console + controller from nintendo I was horrified. I was completely convinced that it was going to be the end of the company for good. You can look at a long list of nintendos gadgets over the years and see why I thought it was the worst idea ever; you have the power glove, the robot, the game matt that barely worked, the power scope, the virtual boy, mario paint (ok ok, I loved mario paint)… I know I’m missing some but you get the idea, crazy gadgets that no one bought. It might just be nostolgia, or nintendos marketing might actually be working on me, but I might be somewhat entertaining the idea of considering to think about possibly maybe looking into perhaps allowing myself to ponder about getting one. Believe me - this ever so slight desire / interest / curiosity will probably pan out to be nothing, but there is a chance that if it is really cool and.. ahm.. “revolutionary” that it might be an option. It’s insane, I know, the thought shouldn’t even be crossing my mind, but it is and I can’t help it. Why the change of heart? Well I’ll tell you right now that it’s based MAINLY on rumors and speculations, just to put into perspective how improbable it is that I would ever get one. Here are my reasons, if they should turn out to be true, for even wasting my time thinking about it:
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Over the next couple weeks I’ll be finishing off my portfolio as a final project for my portfolio class. I just registered http://www.dustindupree.com/ and put up what I have so far for it, there isn’t much in the pre-loading department yet so expect to wait for thumbs / full images to load. I have only tested this in IE6/FF1.5 so I really can’t say if it works in anything else, but I would be suprised if it didn’t since it’s 99.9% flash.

Anyway, check it out if you want to or wait until it’s complete.

After being very confidant in my cooking skills after successfully cooking many delicious soups I was really eager to try my hand at making sushi after receiving the sushi kit I ordered from woot. Well, sushi is a little bit more complicated than pouring a bunch of crap into a pot and waiting an hour and a half until soupy goodness. Let’s just say I set out to make maki (the cool little rolled up things) but ended up with something a little bit closer to chirashi (sushi in a bowl, kind of like a sushi salad). I was all prepared to have pictures of beautifully prepared california rolls in my cheap little sushi plate with some soy sauce and wasabi side dishes, but I wasn’t exactly aching to document this first attempt. I ended up with 3 decent real california rolls (inverted rice) and 6 lame california rolls with the rice on the inside of the nori (seaweed, actually compressed alge) and a big bowl of sushi mess. The good news is that it tasted good, it was better than the little sushi box california rolls you can buy in some stores, that’s for sure. The ingredients were fine, but what I really failed on was the preparation. Right of the bat I used WAY too much rice. It didn’t look like it while it was on the nori, but after I rolled it up it was way too fat to be a california roll. To make that mistake even worse I only used half a nori so that I wouldn’t have to cut off the excess pieces, so the nori wasn’t even going around all of the fillings (avocado, crab, cucumber). It seemed like it would still work at this point, but when I started trying to cut it I realized that my first sushi expedition was bound for failure. The knife I chose was way too fat and dull for sushi cutting and it was getting stuck on the nori, I also used brown rice instead of the extra short grain sushi rice so my knife was getting stuck on rice way more than it should have been. It might have been ok with a better knife, but being a beginner I should have just went with the sushi rice. Anyway, after that horrible failure I used the other half of nori to try to make a california roll that wasn’t inverted, but again since I only used half a nori there wasn’t really enough. In one final attempt to make something that resembled real maki, I patched in an extra strip of nori to finish it off and it actually worked out OK. Having the nori on the outside made it easier to cut. I had a little bit of rice left, so I made 3 proper california rolls which turned out OK. Hopefully my next attempt will be better and I’ll be able to get some pictures.

It was a couple days before Easter that it came to me. I was knocking about in a bookstore browsing the bargain bins because I’m typically a pretty cheap bastard when it comes to buying things that aren’t over priced teas. I saw a sushi book that tempted me briefly, but then I remembered that one was coming with the “sushi at home kit” I purchased from the woot off a few days earlier. I started looking at some of the other cooking books, yearning for some more diverse foods to make to facilitate my procrastination - much like what I’m doing now by making a blog post about this, but I digress. (more on that later).

My eyes skimmed the shelves and there It was, sitting larger than all the other books surrounding it and glimmering brightly. I was drawn to it as if by divine intervention - the hand of God forcing me to finally see the light after years of neglect. Where had I gone wrong? I remember as a child my parents trying to force it down my throat and me pushing it away. All these thoughts rushed through my head as I picked it up and skimmed through it. Everything I read made sense, it’s as if I was born again right in the middle of that aisle. I would no longer starve for something better, living my days deprived of meaning and will to go on.
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