Mostly Harmless

Non-dairy pudding experiment goes horribly awry!

Operating under the hope that the pudding thickening process was not necessarily tied to the chemical interaction of the instant pudding mix with Real Actual Milk I attempted to make some vanilla pudding with a box of, you guessed it, vanilla pudding mix, and non-dairy (also vanilla) Almond Breeze.

The shaking process went pretty well, I thought, but alas, the pudding did not thicken, or even make a half-assed attempt to thicken. Bad pudding! Thicken I say! Thicken! (hmmm… reminds me that I have some left-over chicken…)

Operating under the new hope that some refrigeration might help things along I put some in the fridge and, ahem, drank the rest. Yes, random web visitor, the pudding is only slightly thicker than fake milk, which is, to say, not very damn thick at all. It is still pretty tasty though. If it were chock full of vitamins and protein it would make the best tasting protein shake ever, but it isn’t, so it doesn’t.

A few days of refrigeration have done nothing to improve the pudding’s non-pudding-like nature. I bet the freezer would do it, I could make pudding pops or something… but I suspect that I’ll just buy some Real Actual Milk, or Real Actual Pudding instead. I eat cheese all the time anyway… and ice cream… and chocolate. One could argue that I don’t do a good job of avoiding dairy products, but occasionally I do cut back (to zero).

Anywho, I think I’ll start the day with a nice glass of pudding and some re-heated, dead chicken. Yummy!

Movable Type fails silently if you run out of disk quota on your webserver, which would explain the zero-length index.shtml file that was here until a few minutes ago.

I’m only using 100 megs, man.

MTV is running the MTV Movie Awards again tonight — just in case you missed it the previous three times. The show is moderately entertaining with Seann William Scott and Justin Timberlake doing a fine job of hosting.

The musical performance of note is the Russian lesbian duo of T.A.T.U. and the 100+ Britney Spears “Hit Me Baby, One More Time” schoolgirl replicants who swarm the stage, dance erotically, and strip down to their underwear, climaxing with a mass lesbonic lip-lock the likes of which regular cable has never seen.

The party ensues at one hour and forty-one minutes into the show, if you are of a mind to catch it. Perv.

More impressive than the can-opener install was the TiVo upgrade. I added a 120-gig drive to the current 80-gig drive in my SVR-3000. This means that my video recorder now has 150% more drive space than my computer. It also means that I can record continuously at high quality for just over four days.

For warranty voiding fun, go to www.weaknees.com

I decided that opening cans of food was too much work so I spent some time drilling holes in my cabinet to install an under-cabinet electric can-opener.

The limited clearance forced me to use an actual screwdriver to install the long-ass bolts (Shock! Horror!). Combined with the emptying of the cabinets I figure the energy expended was enough to have opened a great number of cans… so the ROI is minimal.

I have opened a single can thus far. It was uneventful.