Sunday ramblings

I'll repeat it again - working on the weekend sucks if you don't get paid for it! Then I get home, and for now my wireless internet is behaving. I've had trouble the last three days or so with an incredibly flaky connection, and problems with the ISP's ability to route address requests. For example, here's a traceroute I did a few hours ago:

Jennifer-Michaels-Computer:~ jennifermichaels$ traceroute 128.196.11.235
traceroute to 128.196.11.235 (128.196.11.235), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 5.462 ms 5.478 ms 117.221 ms
2 * 10.242.0.1 (10.242.0.1) 15.217 ms 82.576 ms
3 * * *
4 68.2.13.74 (68.2.13.74) 45.668 ms * *
5 68.2.13.30 (68.2.13.30) 47.191 ms 56.934 ms 50.246 ms
6 * * *
7 68.2.14.73 (68.2.14.73) 57.214 ms * *
8 * * chndbbrc01-pos0101.rd.ph.cox.net (68.1.0.164) 318.194 ms
9 * * langbbrj01-so060100.r2.la.cox.net (68.1.1.231) 48.874 ms
10 * * *
11 * * core-01-so-1-1-0-0.lsag.twtelecom.net (66.192.251.24) 60.496 ms
12 * * *
13 hagg-01-ge-1-3-0-508.tcsn.twtelecom.net (66.192.253.245) 72.112 ms 98.805 ms 48.744 ms
14 * 207.250.65.134 (207.250.65.134) 41.682 ms *
15 tuco.telcom.arizona.edu (192.80.43.57) 79.965 ms 61.697 ms 52.607 ms
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * * *
19 * * *
20 * * *
21 * * *
^C
not to forget to mention that this took three minutes to process!

I'm still showing problems with simple traceroutes. But at least my connection is more stable and allowing me to IM (the connection is just quite slow sometimes but at least it eventually works).

I'm a bit fed up with the hurricane coverage. I just overheard this on CBS Evening News:
Blonde reporter: "It's kind of a ghost town here. Why are you still here?"
FA Local: "My home is my castle....my fish need me."
shakes head My cats will take care of your fish if you want ;)

I stopped by Wild Oats on my way home from work today. I was happy to find in the freezer case chicken nuggets and fish sticks that were gluten-free. I picked up more gluten-free pasta, and a gluten-free beef stroganoff (just add beef). Since I had coffee for breakfast, and it was pushing 3:00PM, I decided to try the chicken nuggets and some of the new pasta.

I really just need to accept that gluten-free pasta is pretty much going to suck. This was a corn-based pasta instead of being brown rice. The texture was very smooth (compared to the brown rice pasta I tried). But it was very chewy. The directions said only cook in boiling water for 4-6 minutes and don't overcook it. Perhaps I overcooked it, but it's hard to tell.

The chicken nuggets were an even bigger disappointment. It claimed that the chickens were free-range with no hormones. I only wish I could figure out how the got the breading on the "chicken". The breading was wonderful - crispy after baking. But the meat was crumbly and VERY dry. My gluten-free BBQ sauce helped some, but it was very disappointing. Hopefully the fish sticks are better.