Dujodu Blog

I don’t drink much soda these days since I’ve been mainly drinking water and tea and fruit (in smoothie form). When I DO drink soda, I at least try to make it worth my while. We picked up a case of Sprecher products while I was getting my replacement pair of Koss headphones for free* so I had a lot more soda than usual over the past few weeks. After that ran out, my soda addiction was on the verge of kicking back in, so I actually went to go seek out a soda to buy in the store. I went over to the freezer section and saw Sprecher so I instantly looked for my favorite product of theirs, puma cola. Unfortunately they had no puma cola, I wasn’t feeling like a root beer so I tried their ginger ale. I was surprised that I actually liked it since I haven’t had ginger ale in a really really long time and when I did I remember it being not that great. But anyway, a few days after drinking that I was craving some more ginger ale, and I happened to be in outpost when I spied a 4 bottle pack of some over priced ginger beer. It’s like root beer, but ginger (errr… I think). Whatever the hell it was, I liked it.

A few days after I finished that off I stumbled across a webpage that claimed to have a recipe for home made ginger ale. I don’t remember what I was looking up I think it might have been yogurt or soy paneer cheese, but it struck my interest. It looked like I would need to find some yeast and some ginger extract which I didn’t have, so I looked around for some more recipes and came across one that looked like it was much easier to make. I got the ingredients (1 cup of chopped ginger, yikes) and made it. It was pretty good, it was not as good as the sprecher ginger ale or the ginger beer, but it was definitely not bad for home made soda beverage. I tried to cut out some of the sugar but you just can’t do it, without the right amount it just does not taste right. I think maybe I’ll pick up some yeast and ginger extract and try it the other way to see how the taste differs. Either way it was a nice little experiment.

As some of you know I recently returned from a short trip (Sunday - Wednesday) to Minocqua, WI. We stayed in a small cabin right off of some lake (yeah I know, this is shaping up to be the worst story ever). Here is an overview of what happened during that time:

Before the trip:

I was pretty convinced that this was going to be a boring trip. It was nice to step away from reality for a few days, but it also came at a very inconvenient (busy) time so I wasn’t exactly excited about going. I was trying to find somewhere to use my new gadget (the laptop) to connect to the internets, and I came across a website for a coffee shop (and more) called Life Spring that looked pretty promising. An excerpt from the official website:

A Northwoods rarity, LifeSpring offers more than just the highest quality coffee and espresso in the Minocqua area. Come experience the easy, open atmosphere and eclectic mix of healthy food, free high-speed Internet access, local fine art, antiques and practical/unusual resale items.

Ok, sounds pretty cool. Potentially lame, but sounds promising. They appear to only be open until 2:00 on Sunday, and closed on monday. We were going to leave early on Wednesday, so that only leaves two possible days to go there. We decide to go right when we get in town on Sunday and check it out.

(more…)

For some reason I’m really in the market for gadgets lately. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve acquired or will recently be acquiring all sorts of them. First of all I now have in my possession a laptop. It’s not MY laptop, it’s MATCs laptop, but I can use it for now at least. It’s a pretty insane laptop, it’s an Intel (eh) 2.0 GHz dual core processor(!), 1GB of RAM, 80 GB hard drive (err, I think), 17″ landscape display, built in Wi-Fi, fingerprint scanner (seriously, that is ridiculous), and probably all sorts of other crazy features.

Well, a laptop is nice and all, but who the hell wants a laptop without internet access? So I’ve been planning on getting a wireless router so I can split the roadrunner connection and get a wireless lan going, so you’ll probably be hearing about that a lot - especially if my $20 woot wireless D-Link router is a total piece of crap. That’s right, as usual woot comes to the rescue with a great deal on a product I’m actually in the market for (kind of like the zip disc that I received in my Bag’O'Crap, but this time on purpose). It’s gotten a LOT of shitty reviews, but I’ve also seen SOME good reviews, so maybe there is a lot of “user error” going on out there or the firmware sucked when it came out. Either way, it should be here in a week and I can test it out for myself. I didn’t really want to blow $70 on a router that I might only use for half a year or something, so hopefully this will at least be usable.

And crazy gadget #3, a PreSonus Firebox firewire audio interface. If you aren’t into computer audio, that would roughly translate to “a new sound card” which will hopefully provide better sound fidelity than my crappy motherboards soundcard. I’ve only had limited testing with it because I’ve been so damn busy lately, but I hope to record something ASAP with it just to see how far I can take the recordings. I still really want to finish the songs I’ve been working on too, before they get lost in riff wasteland.

I’ll get some pictures up soon of all the gadgetry. Something I want to blog about in the near future: RSS feeds. They are so damn cool and underrated, I think everyone should probably be using them. Instead of checking my blog every day you can sit back and do something useful and be alerted via RSS (which is much less obtrusive than e-mail IMHO) every time I update!! How is that not the coolest thing ever? Especially if you like to read multiple blogs or infrequently updated sites.