Four Wins From the Past Month

A Friday Hodgepodge

Image by Petr Meissner, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

1. Visiting one of my brothers and his family over Thanksgiving, I got to re-visit a card game I learned in college and taught him, but had forgotten about.

"Dahimian" was what we called it in college, but I have never found anything called that, much less a card game. Some internet sleuthing based on the rules of play indicates that dahimian is likely a corruption of Dai Hinmin, a Japanese game that gained currency in the U.S. some decades before I learned the very similar game we played.

It had been a long time since I played cards in person and we had a blast, surprising ourselves when we realized we spent something like five hours playing this.

2. Fellow foodies may be surprised to see me list remembering cocktail franks here as a win, and fellow parents might wonder how I could have forgotten about them for so long: Kids love these.

My son asked me to make macaroni and cheese some time back, and I was puzzled over what meat I'd serve with this and a vegetable side to be able to serve a well-rounded meal. Andouille went over well enough, but didn't seem quite right.

Then one day, like a bolt from the blue, I recalled liking cocktail franks as a child and realized that this was the solution I was looking for.

The kids loved it and I now have an easy combination I can keep on hand for a meal that feeds the family and takes only 20 minutes to make: mac and cheese, cocktail franks, and a frozen vegetable. (I alternate between green beans, which my daughter prefers, and the green peas favored by my son.

3. For the next few weeks, the kids and I are still in Florida finishing up the semester and preparing to move, while my wife, whose career has led her to New Orleans, is there starting her new position.

On road trips, we enjoy listening to audio books, often by Brandon Sanderson.

During the Thanksgiving drive, we listened to Defiant, the last of his Skyward series.

4. Hooray for backups! One morning, while I was preparing for another trip, I was running my backup script as I do each week, when a dialog box suddenly and unexpetedly informed me that my computer was no longer connected to Dropbox.

I lost no data there, fortunately, but my postmortem caused me to realize that (a) either or both of an outdated BIOS and a defective USB port and (b) a old (and badly-written) backup script joined forces to wipe out about two thirds of my home subdirectories.

The previous backup meant I'd lost only about three hours' worth of work, and the postmortem helped me see an obvious fix to the backup script that would make it impossible for it to wipe any data from a home directory in the future. (It also now periodically verifies that the computer can see the backup media and fails safely if it doesn't.)

I have isolated the computer's part(s) of problem enough to work around it/them for the time being, and fix them outright later.

-- CAV