this girl drives a tank

my favorite kind of rice

I am doing a favour for a girl in our building by setting her up with a computer cobbled together from what is laying around. It actually isn't too bad, 1.7GHZ P4, 1GB ram and a 20GB hard drive. The sound, video and ethernet are all built in. The horror of course is having to go through the XP install process. The actual OS isn't bad to install, relatively hands off, but it did take about 45 minutes. The killer though is the updates, it first installed 57 security fixes, that took about an hour to download, install and then the mandatory reboot, followed by the Service Pack 2 update which took about the same amount of time. Why on earth they cannot bundle this into one download is beyond me.

I counted 8 of those annoying balloon notification thingies, you know..."your computer maybe at risk..." or "click here to take a tour of XP..." or "new updates availabe..."

Apparently you can turn them off but I haven't tried this yet.

I am now struggling to find drivers for the on-board sound and video. After all of this she still won't have any software worth a darn except maybe firefox, oh and solitaire. This experience always makes me want to hug Debian.

(now Windows seems to have found even more updates to download....)

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I went to dinner the other evening to an Indian restaurant, a Tandoori one to be precise and I had the loveliest rice I have ever tasted, the problem is I cannot recall what kind it was and I wanted to duplicate it at home. We use a brand of basmati rice called Tusk which is absolutely delicious, but I have to guess the rest of the ingredients by memory. I tried this in my rice cooker with a small stick of cinnamon, some cloves and yellow currents and although it was pretty good, it was missing something, saffron perhaps, I am not sure. I am now on a mission to find out how to cook perfect Indian style rice.