Now with Wishstixs™!

It has been a long busy week dealing with a particularly high maintainence user who likes to shoulder surf around me and who thinks everything is a critical emergency. His group uses a product named Continuus and they just bought a nice 4-way 420R as the old 2-way E450 didn't seem to be performing well enough for them.

They don't really need the extra horsepower really, but they can't afford any downtime and the guy who masqueraded as a Unix admin prior to me should be taken out and beaten for crimes against system administration as putting a database on Sun DiskSuite partitions at raid 5 is just insanity...ah well. Well, once they get migrated to the new box by next week, I'll get to reinstall the old E450 from scratch and they'll have lots of extra cycles and faster disks.

I've spent much of my week working with the Solaris kstat utility and the SE Toolkit which is an indispensible suite of tools when coupled with Solaris Internals book and the Sun Performance and Tuning bible by Adrian Cockcroft. Thank you Alan Burlison for kstat :) Now, can I ask for a self-tuning kernel?! :)

Other than mangling solaris kernels and resisting the urge to harm annoying users this week I replaced the tank valve on the toilet. It's odd how pedantic you can be about computers then put up with a cantankerous toilet for months. Finding a plumber around here requires getting a convent of nuns to say a novena so I just decided to fix the bloody thing myself. I understand why plumbers charge so much as it isn't difficult work but plumbing is never in a convenient and easy to reach place. After an hour of grunting and cussing I now have a toilet tank that fills *and* shuts off once the water level is reached. Oh, the luxury! Yes, it's sad, I'm turning into my parents...

And I'm preparing for a big Thanksgiving dinner at home for a small crowd. One of the people coming is a vegetarian so his wife mentioned they'll be bringing a Tofurkey which is described as:

Tofurky™ is a pre-cooked vegetarian feast designed to be the delicious centerpiece of your holiday or everyday meal.

They even have 'Wishstixs™' made out of Tofurky Jurkey [of course] to fill the nostalgia for wishbones of a real turkey:

To begin your feast, we have included 2 Tofurky WishStixs™ in every box of Tofurky! Made from our new, Tofurky Jurky, these stixs are meant to add a little bit of fun to your meal. Gather 2 to 4 folks, have everyone take an end, make a wish and pull! With Tofurky WishStixs, everyone has already won because no animal was sacrificed in the making of this product.

No animal may have been sacrificed but a few dictionaries were I think...stixs? :) I should dig out the postcard I have that shows a butcher from the waist down slicing up a side of beef with the caption "Screw vegetarians! Let's eat meat!" and put it on the fridge for amusement value.

Minnesota Public Radio interviewed the company to get to the bottom of the enigma of the Tofurkey. Personally, I think the radio personality just liked saying Tofurkey. They claim that while no Tofurkey has been seen in the wild they know it has four legs since it has four drumettes. :) Hmm...I think my recipe for Maple-glazed Turkey with Dijon Gravy and Country-bread stuffing with parmesan, raisins, and pine nuts sounds more...meaty, but I may just have to try it for the novelty of it. MPR also had a piece on the meat version turkey taste test by Cooks Illustrated who also have the very helpful Turkey Help site for stricken meat bird bakers for any occasion.

I'm looking forward to staying at home next weekend after the holiday to catch up on a few projects and maybe even read a few books stacked up on a chair who even now mock me from where I sit.