Meme details after the jump:

Orignated on Facebook.

1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random… Read More… Read More”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to “Random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

5 – Post it to FB with this text in the “caption” and TAG the friends you want to join in. (you can untag yourself if you don’t want this photo up)

Note: I’d also feel free to hit those links a few times to get stuff that will have the best impact. Rules were made to be broken! Or just follow the directions to the letter if you want. Fun!

I was attending a BBQ and as such made a batch large enough for approximately 24 patties. You’ll probably want to adjust the portions accordingly. Just adjust the ratio of the ingredients to match the amount of meat you’ll be using.

Here’s my shopping list and their respective quantities:

Ground Beef – 5 lbs
Premium Sake – 1 Tb Spoon
Mirin – 2 Tb Spoons
Garlic Jalapeno – 3 Tea Spoons (Chopped) or equiv 3 cloves
Soy Sauce – 1/2 Cup
Sugar – 1/3 Cup
Scallions (Green Onions) – 5 (Chopped)
Pure Sesame Oil – 2 Tb Spoons
Sesame Seeds – 2.5 Tb Spoons
Water Chestnuts – 1 Cup *8oz *1 Can (Chopped)
Bacon – 24 Strips
Toothpicks – 24
Kimchi – Lots of it

This is pretty straight forward. Like cooking anything else, it always helps to have everything prepared. Your dishes, cutting board, knives, paper towels, and of course a clear area in which to prepare everything. It just makes everything run that much more smoother. Plus if you’re like me and enjoy photographing the process so you’ll have a pseudo visual cook book, it looks a lot better.

The first thing you’ll want to do is dump all the toothpicks into a container of water so they’ll be moist. This will prevent them from catching fire or burning etc when you BBQ, fry, grill, or however else you’ll be cooking them. Definitely don’t need the taste of the burger altered by a tiny piece of flaming wood now would you?

Part of making the Bastardized Kimchi Burger is making a Bastardized Bulgogi Sauce. I most definitely must thank Jenifer D. for the vital ingredient list since I must say all the various bulgogi sauces I’ve made before pale in comparison to this concoction. First step is to chop up the scallions also known as green onions.

Next step is to mix all the liquid ingredients together with the sugar in a bowl. Fill a larger bowl with warm water and place your smaller bowl into it. Pour the sugar into the bowl and begin mixing it with the soy sauce. The larger bowl of warm water will help the sugar dissolve. Pour in the sesame oil, sake, and mirin.

Now you’ll want to add all the solid ingredients into the mix. Stir in the sesame seeds, scallions, and garlic jalapenos. Stir it all up good. These ingredients will inevitably float to the surface but try to mix them as best as you can. It’ll look like there is way too much but keep in mind it’s all floating atop a ton of liquid.

You’ll want to put the sauce aside as you get ready to prepare the parts that go into the meat patties.

It’s probably easiest to buy a can of water chestnuts as opposed to buying them fresh. It just makes the process slightly quicker and saves time. Pop open that can and drain all the water from the can, squeeze whatever water you can from the chestnuts themselves as well. They’ll be soaking up plenty of flavour later.

You’ll have a varying amount of chestnuts. Just eyeball the amount, you can add more or less depending on your personal preference. Approximately a large handful. 8 fluid oz or 1 cup of chestnuts. I purchased 2 cans, but decided to scale them back slightly for my 5lbs of beef and only used 1 can.

Chop up the chestnuts. If you have a ginzu knife, now’s the time to whip it out and slice, dice and make julien fries! Well not quite. Just chop up the water chestnuts so that they’re small enough to mix easily with the meat. They’re only meant to enhance the final texture of the burgers so you can adjust the amount added based on your own preference.

Kimchi is of course the most important aspect of this recipe and since you really can never have too much kimchi just get yourself a large jar of it. Unless you’re skilled at making your own kimchi. Any leftovers you have can always be used elsewhere. If you’re having a barbecue you can always use it as a condiment for your hot dogs. That always tastes good as well.

Just like the water chestnuts, you’ll want to chop up the kimchi so that they are in pieces small enough to easily mix with the meat. It’s better to err on the side of smaller pieces since if they’re too large it’ll make it difficult to keep the patties from falling apart. After cooking the burgers the kimchi will be slightly less spicy compared to just eating the kimchi straight, so don’t be afraid to add more.

After you’re done chopping up the water chestnuts and kimchi, you’ll want to keep them separate along with the bulgogi sauce. This will make it easier to mix with the meat than if you just dumped them into a giant bowl at this point. This is also a great time to admire how nice things look laid out. This only goes to enforce my theory that anyone can cook an amazing meal if you have everything set out.

At this point grab the meat and dump it together into a bowl that is large enough to accommodate the amount of beef you’ve purchased. Start breaking the meat apart from it’s container form and mix all the beef together. You may want to wear gloves if you’re afraid of getting meat stuck under your fingernails, but that’s not fun.

Here’s the fun and messy part. Mix the meat slowly whilst adding layers of bulgogi sauce, chopped water chestnuts, and kimchi as you fold the meat into itself. Try to even it all out as much as possible. You’ll want to make sure you thoroughly wash your hands after mixing as well since you’ll be handling some rather spicy ingredients (Kimchi, Garlic Jalapenos).

After you’re done mixing, grab a handful of meat and roll it into a ball on your palm. Press your other palm down with even pressure to create a nice flat and circular patty. Grab a piece of bacon and wrap it around the edges of the meat. Some pieces will stay by themselves but you can secure them with those toothpicks soaking in the water.

Suggestions for serving:
Here’s how I’d serve this burger. Instead of regular hamburger buns, purchase sesame pancake buns from a Chinese bakery. Instead of actual pickles use Asian pickled carrots, radishes etc. Cook up any leftover bulgogi sauce and use it instead of BBQ sauce. Instead of lettuce use a handful of bean sprouts. Serve along with some Cass Lager or Soju. Enjoy!

After reading this book Scott Adams is someone I’ll have to add to my continuing fascination with humourists who are incredibly talented and clever when it comes to more serious things. I’m determined to figure out the correlation. I mainly witness it with media celebrities. Perhaps it’s simply raw talent, but take these few people for example. Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, Adam Sandler, and Jamie Foxx.

They’re all known for their comedic work, yet when it boils down to it they all give killer serious performances.  I would almost argue they give better performances than so called “serious” actors.  Jim Carrey has The Majestic and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Robin Williams has Good Will Hunting, House of D, and a numerous others. Adam Sandler has Punch Drunk Love and now Reign Over Me. Jamie Foxx has Collateral, Jarhead and Ray of course.

Anyways, back to the book. It’s a designed to “make your brain spin around inside your skull”.  The book is filled with numerous notions of why life is life, the world is the world, and things are the way they are.  It’s a story which calls into question our perceptions of reality, God, science, physics, the world around us.  Much like the move Matrix, it makes you think about what reality is.

The story is about meeting an old man, that happens to know literally everything.  He has an explanation for everything you’ve ever wanted to know.  Things about evolution, God, light, psychics, phenomenons, probability, free will, pattern recognition, relationships and more.  The book is filled with his explanations of all these topics.

As the book warns, although it has no violence or sex the ideas are powerful and not appropriate for readers under fourteen. It also warns that the main character has a view about God that you’ve probably never heard before.  So if you think you’d be easily offended by this character’s view then also don’t read this.

Scott Adams penned this book to be a thought experiment.  His experiment is this: “Try to figure out what’s wrong with the simplest explanations”.

Furthermore he encourages you to share God’s Debris with a smart friend and then discuss it while enjoying a tasty beverage.  So that’s what I’m doing here.  Go out and get it and read it then come back here and rant   It’s a quick read, takes less than a day. Large type, short sections, limited pages.

Well every year up on Grouse Mountain they hold a special day of free skiing / snowboarding with a minimum monetary donation or canned food towards charity. This year that free day was Dec. 6th. I didn’t announce it before on here because…well I found out very last minute and quite honestly wanted to be amongst the few to enjoy it. Aren’t I nice and greedy?

I couldn’t ask for better weather. There was just enough cloud cover to keep the sun from being a glaring nuisance, yet they were high enough above the city that I had a clear view all the way to Mt Baker and you could see Vancouver Island. Those cold clear winter days always makes everything appear so much closer than they are.

We headed up to the mountain as early as it opened with a short stop prior at Blenz for some wake up java. It had to play into make all jealous of the amazing day plan.

After getting in a couple of runs we chilled out at the lodge and had a nice slice of pizza sitting out on the patio overlooking Vancouver and everything else below. I believe we did an effective job in making all the people needing to work Wednesday jealous. We squeezed in a few extra runs in after lunch and had a nice little sit down by the open fire pit by the ice pond where some kids were ice skating.

I haven’t been up to Grouse since elementary school day ski trips and boy is it a lot nicer than I remembered. It looked like the day was the first outing of the season for many others. Luckily for me I had company tumbling down the mountain with a board attached to my feet whilst I reacquainted myself with this sport.

The rest of the day was very enjoyable with Melissa doing my hair after we came back down and grabbed some more coffee. We decided to iron chef it with the brick of salmon my dad had caught awhile back. Enough salmon to cook in two different methods with limited ingredients. So what ended up happening is a piece of salmon covered in honey mustard sauce, lime juice and rosemary and a piece of salmon covered in lime, cilantro, rosemary, and some other spices I can’t quite recall. In the end we had that served up with some vegetables (zucchinis and mushrooms) and some rice (which was a mix of white and brown rice). Delicious! There was way to much so the quest to invite more friends over began and much was devoured.

The perfect ending to a nice spontaneous snow day. I love Vancouver. Oh, you can view more photos here.

I’ve always enjoyed Ryan Gosling’s performances and he’s probably one of the most underrated actors around. I don’t know if it ever made it to syndication in the US, but the majority of Canadians will probably remember him on the show Breaker High.

Anyways in this movie he plays the role of a drug addicted teacher at an inner city school in the Bronx. He probably does one of the most realistic portrayals of a *that* amazing teacher that every student has had. Unlike other movies where the teachers just get portrayed in such a cheesey manner or acted out that way at least. His habits get discovered by a student of his and from there an akward friendship/relationship begins. Each character having their flaws and each with very pivotal circumstances arising. Trust me just go see it, it’s very good. It’s about people, choices, chances, and change.
Only thing I’m not liking right now is how all the critics always over-praise a movie to the point that you expect the film to be some sort of super film that not only blows your socks off but does your laundry and folds your socks as well. Gosling’s performance already has critics pegging it as Oscar worthy, but dont’ get totally distracted by that because Shareeka Epps does an amazing job too.

Here’s the trailer:

Anyways, it is a free all ages event where every Friday they start off the night with free lessons from a handpicked local instructor. So Free Dance Lessons everybody! Summertime is always wedding season too. So if you’re the stumbling groom, here’s a nice place to take your soon to be wife and practice!

Tonight was the Rumba, but coming up are the Waltz, Ceroc (Jive/Salsa Fusion), West Coast Swing, Jive, Swing, Social Foxrot, Tango, and Salsa.

This runs till Sept 1st and the full schedule can be viewed here.

The current recommendations are based off of keywords used to describe the books you read, but as more people start using it for suggestions it will have a more realistic and human recommendation for books. So if you’ve read any books lately submit it if you have the chance to and help it get going.

They also have a spin off project called Blog Code, which essentially does the same for blogs. So if you’re looking at reading a blog that has a similar feel you can punch in the existing blog that you currently read and it’ll pop up a list of blogs that are similar.

I’m presuming it was given its name by the Juniper tree that is clinging so ruggedly at the edge of the point. I like ::wikipedia(Juniper, Juniper):: trees almost just as much as I like ::wikipedia(Joshua tree,Joshua):: trees. There’s just something about both of them that strike me as trees that have souls or a story to tell.

You can check out this panorama I took.

Anyways I spent a good deal of the day there today climbing a few routes. The weather finally cleared up enough for me to go outside and not worry about wet holds. I realized I’m horribly out of practice as a few of the rocks got the best of me. I didn’t get a chance to do any bouldering but that was alright. Here’s one of the routes I tried to hit. It’s probably a hard 5.10 or 5.11 if you decide to traverse left. I hear it takes about 2 weeks of constant climbing to get back in the groove.

Regardless you can imagine the beauty of hanging off the side of a cliff dangling over an endless ocean. With the waves lapping gently below, lulling you into a sweet trance with nature.

I met a few tourists that are here for the summer and we ended up exchanging info. A Frenchman named Remi Marten (which I found quite amusing), a Portuguese guy named Vasco and some real quiet “stay away from the West Coast guy” Quebecois. It was definitely interesting conversing with this bunch. Especially with the differences. Like their offers to pay for part of my “petrol” should I organize a Squamish trip with them

I got pretty beat up by the rocks a few time, but there’s certainly nothing that beats the feeling of topping out on a route you’re struggling on. The only sign of injury this time is a mildy scraped shin from a small fall that resulted in me swinging about 10 feet across the face.

Well that’s about it, since my fingers are pretty sore from jamming them into odd shaped crevices and cracks. *note* it sucks when you happen to be clinging to the side of a rock face and you slide your finger right up against a hornet.

Well next time I’m out there I’m going to see if I can get WiFi (there’s cell service out there), just to see if it’s actually possible to re-enact one of those royalty free photos of someone sitting on the edge of a cliff surfing the net. That’s quite amazing seeing that sometimes I barely get a signal sitting in an office building.

Moodlogic’s problem was that it requires a download and essentially is only useful for making a mix CD and that’s about it. It could be more powerful, however it does not help you find new music.

What makes Pandora work is it is quick and accessible. It allows you to listen to music you do not own and provides great information on why it presents the music it does to you. If you want it even conveniently links you over to Amazon and iTunes for quick purchases.

Another plus with Pandora is it seems to be great at picking up on Indie artists as well, things from local garage bands to mainstream pop. It has it all. If you want to save your stations you’ll need to set up a user account, but even that is done right. It’s quick, pain free and doesn’t require jumping through your email to verify various things.

Music for the people, the way it should be.

Before you install this plugin be aware that you must have modified SlimStat to track cities, as well as you will need a Google Map API Key for your own site.

The Google Map PHP API is a slightly modified version of Monte Ort’s creation here. I’ve modified it so that it retrieves using CURL instead of fopen since on some servers that has been disabled due to security. If you find you get errors using the one I included simply download Monte’s original.

This is what GMapped produces once you have been tracking cities for awhile. Since I had SlimStat installed for awhile there are some records in the database that do not contain coordinates to plot on the map, therefore it does not show all the records. It will show the same records as what is displayed when you view Paths.

To install simply extract the archive into the plugins directory and make a few changes to the index.php to include your Google Map API Key and to change the references to the browser icons if necessary.

You will also need to add the following to the /slimstat/_css.css file:


/* GMapped */
.gmapSidebarItem {
list-style: none;
border-bottom: 1px dotted #ccc;
background-color: #eee;
padding: 2px 2px 3px 3px;
}
#sidebar_mymap {
width: 200px;
height: 450px !important;
overflow : auto;
border-bottom: 1px solid #369;
}


After you’ve done all that you just need to wait for enough visitors to be logged with coordinates and you’re set.

Latest Version:

Download GMapped_v01.zip

Version History:

v0.1 – June 8, 2006

• Initial Release

Feedback, suggestions, bugs etc can be posted here or in the Google SlimStat Group