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I'm making gumbo tonight for thomasroche. I don't make it like most folks because 1) I like butter and 2) I like okra. Darren's File' Gumbo 1/2 cup butter 1/2 cup flour 1 large onion, diced 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley 1/2 cup chopped celery 1 cup chopped banana pepper 1 cup sliced okra 1 chopped and seeded jalapeno pepper 6 cloves minced garlic 4 cups chicken broth 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon gumbo file' 2 lbs of sausage and shrimp. Combine butter and flour in a pot and cook for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring constantly, until it starts to turn a golden brown color. This is the roux. Pan fry the cut up okra in some butter. Add onions, parsley, celery, peppers, and garlic and cook about 10 more minutes or until vegetables are tender, stirring regularly. Add broth, salt, okra and creole seasoning. Cover pot and simmer 15 minutes stirring occasionally. Add your meat at this point and simmer an additional 10 minutes. Ladle over steamed white rice. Tags: recipes
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Today I made a flippant remark that generated a fuckload of publicity. I'm not used to doing this, at least not on this level. But I really had no idea what my words entailed for me or my company. Basically, I am in the middle of a giant recabling/equipment upgrade project for tribe.net and in the middle of this we have to take out the load balancers and reprogram them to be redundant. Because of this, we couldn't use the normal site down page on tribe.net so I told a contractor exactly the following: "We just need to get a site down page, put something up and we'll replace it with the regular page later." Well, the contractor replaced it with this: === We're down, but don't worry, we'll be back up soon!  We promise to buy you all a pwnie when we're done === For those of you not thoroughly enveloped in the exploding sack of excrement that is Web 2.0, The Fail Whale is the perfect example of a meme perhaps becoming bigger than the organization or network that spawned it. I have my doubts about Twitter ( http://www.twitter.com ) personally, mostly because I have that "show me the money" attitude towards every Web 2.0 company I see. How does Twitter make money? Well, personally I think that the Fail Whale has made that point moot. No matter what Twitter does, whatever accomplishments they may achieve in the future, it will all be completely and horribly overshadowed by their contribution to society in the area of humor in regards to failure. In other words, nothing they ever do will ever erase the Fail Whale. The Fail Whale is the creation of a Chinese born artist, Yi Ying Lu. It's a perfect example of instant fame created out of thin air. The Twitter folks needed a error.html page -- the page you see when the server is overloaded. Looking on a stock photography website, they picked the iconic image of a whale being hoisted aloft by doves with ropes -- a folly as surely doomed to failure as a poor single webserver trying to keep up with 5,000 requests per second (that would actually take about 4 webservers before I was comfortable with handling that many requests). As Twitter felt growing pains (and all web sites do, don't let anyone fool you), the image got burned into users brains more and more. I love this image. My contractor knew I did too. So I laughed my ass off when I saw it, and then I told him to link to http://www.failwhale.com so maybe we could send some of our 129,000 people a day over to Yi Ying Lu to buy a Fail Whale coffee mug or t-shirt. This is one meme near and dear to my heart at the moment, because my job is pretty much like trying to move a whale by myself -- a fact very few people really give two shits about but it is turning out to be far more rewarding than I thought. And now it turns out that my offhand comment to "just throw something up" has given me a little bit of a boost to get through this day full of fail. And folks have started buzzing about it, which was completely accidental -- much like the Fail Whale's original fame. There's no question this work on tribe.net was needed. The site has needed a major overhaul, starting with the servers. I am just scared now that my offhand comment has drawn more attention to tribe.net than I meant it to, and that when the site comes back up it will have a crush of visitors. You folks have no idea how much we DO NOT need that at this point -- I'm only halfway done with everything we are installing! So, I just have to say this in closing: to all you tribe.net users -- we'll be back soon. But we may have a new "Site Down" page.
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So, last night I forced myself to take some time out to get out of the house. I've been doing a lot of walking but not a lot of socializing, and with my friends that usually means alcohol. Of course, the standing Tuesday night haunt is Drunken Monkey at Annie's -- cheap drinks, no cover, and games -- card games, dominoes, and a couple of broken down wheelchairs to drunkenly race around the nightclub once everyone's got a belly full of whiskey. Last night, blaugirl and penguinoid introduced me to Uno. Now, I love card games -- games you play with a deck of cards. My grandmother and I used to play a neat game called Spite and Malice, which is still my favorite game. I learned Hearts and Spades in jail (yes, we played for cigarettes), and poker is a recent obsession -- I only played Texas Holdem recently, but I've been playing Five Card Stud as long as I can remember. UNO, though. Why have I never played this game? OK, so it's not played with a standard deck. I can't imagine why I never played this, though. I liked it immediately, as there was a little bit of strategy involved. Melanie won the first and second game due to my newbie mistakes, but the third game? ALL MINE BABY. I think I am going to play this game again. UNO. Who wants some?* * I am probably adapting this attitude because Evil Dead 2 was playing on the TV.
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