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December 31, 2010

Macadamia Nut Crusted Halibut

Filed under: Cooking — Tyler @ 2:37 pm
Halibut on Table

Macadamia Nut Crusted Halibut on table

This recipe is for Macadamia Nut Crusted Halibut. It will serve about 2 people. We made this on Christmas Eve and even though the halibut is pictured with side dishes, this recipe will only cover the halibut. Once prepared, the dish will be tender, crunchy, mildly sweet and moist. This dish takes a significant amount of time to prepare, but it can be done easily alone. But if you share this Macadamia Nut Crusted Halibut with someone, he or she will probably like you more than the day before. A dish like this is expensive, because you are purchasing high-quality ingredients and fresh fish. But once you make it, you will feel like you just ate something from a fine dining restaurant. The key is to purchase high-quality, fresh halibut. So make sure it was not frozen. The fish should look good when you buy it, and it should be the proper thickness of an inch or so. If it is some kind of huge steak, that won’t work for this recipe. Also if the fish is too thin, it will too “bready” tasting. Here’s what you will need in terms of cookware:

1 x large saucepan: for preparing the sauce

1 x wok style pan: for simmering the fish in the sauce

1 x sturdy wooden cutting board: for smashing up the macadamia nuts and other miscellaneous tasks

1 x large sturdy dish: for breading the halibut

1 x casserole dish: for cooking the breaded halibut

…the usual assortment of knives, large forks, spatulas and other tools…

Once you double check that you have all those items it is time to get out your shopping list for ingredients. For the breading you will need:

1 x bag of macadamia nuts (an $8 bag is what we bought, but you might be able to find one for cheaper. It is good to keep them in the bag so that crushing them is easier and less messy. In the end you will be able to pour out the crushed nuts with ease)

1 x bag of salted oyster crackers

1 x handfull of flour

3 x pinches of salt

2 x egg whites

The key is to prepare the breading first. That way you will be able to focus on making the sauce. Since crushing the macadamia nuts is the trickiest thing to do, you should get that out of the way first. First crush the nuts while they are still in the bag. That way you don’t have to worry about them spilling all over the place. If you ended up getting the macadamia nuts in a jar then use your imagination and crush them up so they are small enough to stick to the fish, but are big enough to provide texture and flavor.

After you crush the macadamia nuts and but them in the wide and deep plate or bowl, start crushing the oyster crackers. Once the oyster crackers are pretty small mix them up with the macadamia nuts. If you want to have a less expensive dish you can always “cut” the breading by using more oyster crackers and less nuts. Then you should add some flour to the mix. Now you are are ready to prepare the halibut and sauce.

For the halibut and its sauce you will need the following items:

1.5 to 2 x lbs of halibut (FRESH … UNFROZEN) Cut into two pieces

1 x olive oil

1 x whole milk

1 x half – stick of salted butter

2 x cups of brown sugar

1 x quarter cup of sweet onions (cut into long pieces)

6 x dates (pitted and broken apart, UNSWEETENED)

butter brown sugar and milk

butter brown sugar and milk

First take the large saucepan and put olive oil in it all around. And then heat the saucepan up really hot. Then put the half stick of butter in it. And let it sit there for about 5 seconds. Before it starts to get too burnt add a significant amount of milk and the brown sugar. The color should look similar to the picture on the right. Stir it up on medium heat. Add a few crushed macadamia nuts. (optional step) Then take the sweet onion slices and stir them in. The onion slices taste delicious with it if you just add a few. Then mix in a little bit of the egg whites. It should be about one-third of the total egg whites. Keep stirring and adjust the heat accordingly. Meanwhile you should have already washed and cut your fish. Your fish should be on some kind of plate waiting to be cooked. AT THIS TIME YOU SHOULD PRE-HEAT YOUR OVEN TO 350 degrees!

Now here is the fun part. Stir in the dates. This is going to make your sauce so yummy and gourmet. If you have a little flour left over add that also, but not too much…just a pinch. Keep stirring and taste it occasionally to see if it is ready to use with the fish. Remember you are going to cook the fish in this sauce first, then you will bake the fish. So this sauce should be slightly sweet to medium sweet. If it is too sweet this fish will be overwhelming.

halibut cooking in pan

halibut cooking in pan

Once the sauce is to the desired taste, put in on medium heat and prepare your wok-style-pan with olive oil. Heat up the pan so it is HOT and then pour in the sauce. The sauce should be bubbling and very hot. Then put the fish in the wok pan and let it be partially submerged. It should look like the picture on the left while cooking the first side.Wait until the color of the fish changes. The bottom should turn to white and the top should be pinkish as pictured. That is when you should flip the fish. Then cook the fish and cover it with the sauce gently. If you stir too aggressively, the fish will break. After a few more minutes turn off the heat and remove the first fish piece from the wok. The fish shouldn’t cook in the wok more than twelve to fifteen minutes.

Take the piece of halibut using a spatula and gently bread it with the macadamia nut breading that you made earlier. After the first layer of crust is on the fish, gently add some egg whites to the halibut and then add some more breading. Then carefully place the breaded halibut piece in the casserole dish.

Finished Macadamia Crusted Halibut

Finished Macadamia Crusted Halibut - with other side dishes

Repeat this process for the other piece of halibut. Then put the casserole dish in the oven which was preheated to 350 degrees. It should bake for about fifteen minutes. (give or take a few, depending on how long you cooked it in the wok) After it is done cooking the halibut should be nicely crusted. In the picture to the right we added some side dishes. So experiment and think of things that would go well with this. This is a dish best served warm to hot. But it should taste very tender. If you did it right the sweetness of the sauce should permeate every bite and the halibut should have actually expanded in size. As you may note in the picture there is a smaller piece that is breaded. That is because part of the halibut broke off when I was stirring it. So I breaded that piece separately. It is OK because the smaller pieces are like candy crunchy bits. But it is preferable to keep your fish piece in tact, if possible.

-Tyler

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December 27, 2010

I am working on new jokes

Filed under: Overidon News — Tyler @ 11:36 pm

I would like to do some stand-up comedy in the near future. So I am making some new jokes. So far I only have one real, “winner” of a joke. The rest are too bland and don’t hit hard enough. A good comedian can bust out multiple jokes per minute that are of varying complexity. The trick is timing so I want to have a lot more than one good joke. But one joke is at least a start.

[UPDATE]

I’ve just written 4 more jokes. And these are good ones. Tonight is going great!

-Tyler

December 25, 2010

Yo Noid NES guide for victory

Filed under: Gaming — Tyler @ 9:54 pm
Yo Noid Victory

Yo! Noid Victory

This is a guide on how to win at Yo! Noid for the NES. It is dedicated to my friend Ryan. This game is a 2D side scrolling platformer. It may seem like a cheesy low budget game at first glance. But after playing it for the past couple months off-and-on, I’ve come to hold a great deal of respect for this fast paced game. Yo! Noid does not in any way allow the player to “Go Easy” on his or herself. You need to be alert and thinking ahead every step of the way. If you are the kind of player who is good at dodging enemies, you will need to use those skills to survive. If you are an aggressive player that likes to rack up points, you will need that personality as well in order to maintain your score and get extra lives. And believe me, you will need all the extra lives you can get. Do you remember in Batman Begins when the main bad guy was training Bruce Wayne at the frozen lake? There was a part where he said to Bruce Wayne, “Mind your surroundings, Bruce.” You will need to heed that advice for Yo! Noid.

Instead of giving you a complete walkthrough of the entire game, read on to have the skills you need in order to be victorious in Yo! Noid In the first couple stages, you will notice that there are strange blocks that float around with roman numeral, “II” or “III” on them. Also, you may see an exclamation mark floating around as well. If you pick these up and survive to an odd numbered stage, you will get to a pizza eating contest with an enemy Noid. The evil Noid will always go first. If you pick a higher numbered pizza than the enemy noid then you will eat the difference of the pizzas. If you use one of those roman numeral things then the amount of pizzas you will have eaten will be multiplied by either “2x” or “3x” depending on whether or not you choose a “II” or “III” pizza modifier. The most important thing to know about this is that if you are able to fill up all the pizza slots and not let the enemy Noid eat a single slice, then you will not only recieve 100,000 bonus points. (You only need 200,000 points to get a free life) You will also get an extra continue! This is key to winning the game because the game gets challenging, especially in the later stages. The first stage you won’t be able to do a clean sweep against the enemy Noid, so you should use your slices strategically in order to achieve a close victory. Remember, the hot sauce and the pepper will make it so the evil Noid can’t use his slices, so use those whenever the Noid picks a high-numbered card of slices.

As you get to the later stages you will be tempted to use your multiplier cards sparingly against the Noid in order to win the battle. But the key is to try and beat him as fast as possible. One thing that you should know is that in the stages beyond stage 3, there are many slice modifier “II” things that are actually invisible. And you need to attack the air like a fool constantly in order to make them appear and for you to take them. So make sure to jump around all the time and search with your yo-yo to find these items. If you don’t do this, you won’t collect enough modifiers in order to do a clean sweep against the enemy Noid on the pizza eating contests.

One thing to mention is that if you do not win the pizza eating contest, you will loose a life and will be sent back to the beginning of the last platforming stage. So it is imperative that when you play a pizza eating contest, you win.

The power-ups in the game are small scrolls and large scrolls. If you attack a large scroll with your yo-yo then a special move item will appear. (or sometimes a 1-up item will appear) The special move is usually a snowflake or a pogo-stick looking thing. But there are others as well. The snowflake move is activated when you have at least an entire horizontal bar of “small scrolls” at the bottom of the screen. To activate it you press, “Down” and “B.” Since it takes an entire horizontal bar, you can only cast the snowflake skill twice before refilling your small scrolls. But the cool thing about this ability, is that you can destroy all destructible enemies on the screen, including flying ones.

The pogo stick skill is cool too, because it can kill enemies that are on the ground with an earthquake. Also it only uses a fraction of the amount of small scrolls to do so. But being able to destroy flying targets is far superior so I prefer the snowflake skill.

There is a fast-run skill also but I haven’t had a lot of luck with that one. Maybe you will have a better time using this ability.

Yo Noid apartment

Yo! Noid - Apartment Stages

Sometimes even getting to the pizza eating contest is a tall order. The first really challenging stage is the second one. There is ice everywhere. A thing to remember here is that when you jump on the floating ice things that travel from side to side, they are slippery. So you need to move in the opposite direction of the one that you were jumping in, in order to stay still and not fall off. In the part where there are two of these things, you can jump then walk a bit to the left to stay stationary. Then wait for the second one to pass you, for some reason it is safer to be patient here. Then when you get closer the second time, do a timed jump onto the other moving ice platform. But you will probably need to jump immediately after you touch down and do a jumping dance on the platform in order to get across. I’ve only been able to land on the second one and stay still a couple times. And it takes a serious amount of practice.

When you’re on the skateboarding stage, the trickiest thing is the football dropping guys. Their footballs explode after a short amount of time. But if you are patient, most of the time these enemies will simply fly over you and their footballs will explode before they hit you. The long jump at the end is doable by picking up some speed from the incline and jumping at the last second before falling off the ramp.

The stage where the dock moves up when you hit a “dock icon” is where you first encounter the invisible, “II” and “III” items. So you should start attacking the air and memorizing where you find the power-ups. The main thing to keep in mind for this stage is Patience. There are this flying fish that jump out and if you are too hasty, they will kill you. So when you jump to a new area inch forward a bit and take out the flying fish. There is this one part where you encounter a silver frog who seems to be invincible. I’ve tried hitting this fool hundreds of times with my yo-yo and he keeps on dancing. This frog is legit and it is best to just jump over this kid before he 2-steps all over you. The cannons in this stage are tricky but you can use the snowflake skill to destroy the bubbles before they explode. If you hit the cannon bubbles with your yo-yo they will send out dangerous smoke that kills you in a wider radius than it you dodge them or use snowflake skill.

In the strange propeller flying stage, you need to immediately press “A” to get a boost of altitude. It was really funny when I first played this stage because I just dropped like a log and died. I busted up laughing when this happened. “Little warning, thanks?!?” Watch out for the flying squirrels.

Yo Noid! Late Stages

Yo Noid! Late Stages

The next stage that is worth mentioning is the circus level. This stage scrolls automatically and you need to move quickly to survive. Many of the carousel creatures turn into bad guys. But the ones that are over botomless pits never turn into bad guys. You need to jump on these things fast and don’t be too patient. If you hesitate then you will die. In later levels the main things to think about is searching for the “II” and “III” items. This circus stage is especially in line with this. The Enemy Noids keep getting more and more slices of pizza to choose from during each pizza eating contest so you will need all the bonuses you can get.

The second to the last stage which is a tall winding apartment exterior is definitely worth discussing in detail. There are these flower pots that come out of windows and you need to get close without dying. Then within range, fire your yo-yo blindly for a while until you kill a couple of them. (you will hear a sound) Then jump over the window. This part is kind of like real life. Standing underneath an open window is a bad idea. You want to stay moving on this stage. There is this sewing machine thing that fires out debris. It is really dangerous. You need to move extremely quickly and get it to shoot at you in one direction and then jump up to the next ledge as fast as you can. If you stand still you will get killed. The hilarious part of this stage is when you go up against a police officer who is tossing a barrel down at you. You need to jump over the barrel. Running away from it will not help. If you run away it will seriously chase you down the entire ridiculous stage. And if you get too close to the police officer he will pull out his Billy Club and terminate you. But if you hang back the cop will simply jump down the apartment to his doom. So don’t try to 1 on 1 the police.

The last stage is another flying stage and it is actually really fun. Just make sure to pick up as many “II” and “III” items as you can. Because you will need them for the final battle with the Green Noid.

Overall this game is excellent for building reflexes and pattern recognition. Like many of the old games, it focuses on dexterity and skill instead of level grinding and perseverance. Even though it is extremely easy to die in this game, it is not very discouraging and if you give it breaks it is a lot of fun. It isn’t rewarding enough of game play to jam out during a weekend. This game is best come back to over a longer period, very casually, in order to gauge how your reflexes and zen concentration is building.

I’d recommend this game to anyone who wants a beatable game that has serious challenge. This is not an impossible game, but it does require some memorization of enemy movement and hidden item locations.

-Tyler

December 21, 2010

SFT Semi Directed Status Updates

Filed under: Observations — Tyler @ 11:53 pm
Strange Facebook Trend Semi-Directed Status updates

Strange Facebook Trend Semi-Directed Status updates

Strange Facebook Trend (SFT) : Semi-Directed Status Updates

I’ve been on Facebook over a year and I’ve noticed an increase in the amount of Status Updates that are at least partially directed at specific people. But the strange thing about it is that the actual person who the status update is directed at is not specifically identified in the status update. To make things more confusing, the actual status update is on the person’s own wall instead of the wall of the person who perpetrated the wrongdoing. So I’ve read things like, “Step off…bro” that show up in my Facebook status news feed. And I’m thinking, “Step off of what? Is my foot on the dog’s tail?” But then I realize that this girl is talking to someone else completely. There have been other updates like, “You know who you are. You need to shut your mouth for once!”

This is a Strange Facebook Trend because it is almost a form of interactive communication, without actually committing to the consequences of directly contacting someone. Because someone could say, “Shut your own mouth!” And the person who wrote the original status update could then say, “I wasn’t talking to you, Roger. You are so narcissistic and egotistical to think that everyone is talking about you all the time.” And then poor Roger could easily develop a complex.

After some analysis of this trend I find that these Semi-Directed Status Updates appear to be a form of lashing out. But in reality, this SFT is a withdrawal symptom which is a result of a lull in over-stimulation. Many people have become so ingrained by contact with other people that they have actually acquired a bio-neural-chemical need for single sentence or like-button communication. It has gotten to such an extreme degree of integration, that many users are even attracting potentially negative attention to their profiles in order to get some sort of contact. This kind of behavior is less like a hobby or recreational activity and more like dependency.

The interesting part about this Strange Trend is that it seems to be increasing and growing in commonality. I’ve noticed this first hand because I’ve stayed at around 800 Facebook friends for half of a year. And not until recently has this phenomenon become prolific enough to write about. After pondering this subject for quite some time, my only conclusion is that this cyber-trend has manifested itself into a physical illness. So one could say that Semi-Directed Status Updates is the first computer virus that has ever successfully infected a human physical host.

To explain this in more detail let’s take a look at the viral nature of Semi-Directed Status Updates. One person, let’s call her Rosie for the purpose of this thought experiment wants extra attention on Facebook. This is because she is so used to constant contact, that she often feels the “longing” sensation, that one has when she has been separated from a lover for an extended period of time. But her longing comes from Facebook ‘likes’ and comments. So she posts a Semi-Directed Status Update on her wall. Now, since she has good looking pictures in her albums, and she occasionally has witty things to say,  200 of her 500 friends frequently visit her profile. So those people often see her status updates within minutes of when they are posted.

But Rosie’s status update is Semi-Directed and says, “I hate it when you treat me like that.” So, one of Rosie’s friends called Frank, comments on her status and says, “Maybe if you weren’t so rude at parties, I wouldn’t have to.” But instead of Rosie saying to Frank that she wasn’t talking to him, Rosie decides to accept the contact and actually build on the communication…whether the communication was intended for Frank or not. So Rosie comments back, “Yeah, well. I was having a bad day.” And now something interesting has happened. Not only has Rosie gotten what she originally set out for, which was communication on Facebook. But she received it without exerting much more than minimal effort and risk. Also, Frank not only got to talk some sassyness with Rosie, but he also learned a new technique for communication on the social network. And the follow-up comment by Rosie, validated the form of communication. So now the Semi-Directed Status Update virus has spread virtually from Rosie’s profile to Frank’s notification area.

But since Frank now has a new tool in his online communication arsenal, if he ever gets lonely on Facebook, he can use a Semi-Directed Status Update in order to attract attention to himself. If he uses this technique enough times, there is a high likelihood that he will eventually acquire the very real and neuro-chemical dependency on the cyber-contact that Rosie originally had. Therefore the computer virus has a dormancy period that is directly related to the psychological needs for contact and attention of the infected host.

Possible implications for this type of crossover-disease may be medication prescriptions for an at-risk population of 500 million or more. There is tremendous potential for the pharmaceutical industry to capitalize on this phenomenon, and require vaccinations for social network users that log-in for 2 hours per day or more. Perhaps a new type of multi-vitamin may be created in order to supplement the psycho-emotional immune system of Facebook users.

-Tyler

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