More Images From Deer Camp

yep...


The ghost of hunting past


Asweepae holding a skull from last years bow hit


The Drive Nazi happily cleaning the cabin


Asweepae and Drive Nazi ready to leave


After too many days in the cabin, anything starts to look good


Pete getting ready to leave at the end of hunting

Gun Hunting Update

Well, another Wisconsin gun deer season is over. It was fairly unimpressive in all; we ended up with the following tally:
Larry - 8 point buck
Pete - 4 point buck, spike buck, doe
Kirk - a doe (after a 5-shot machine gun hail of bullets)
Mark - zippo
Jason - zippo (saw no bucks, about 50 does and fawns)

Larrys buck is already posted here.


The following are pictures of Petes deer:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Winter is coming...

Hunting News and Links

Death toll for deer hunting season climbs to 2

Tragedy looms over Wisconsin deer opener

Wisconsin DNR: Deer Hunting in Wisconsin (2005 Info, 2006 Season Proposal, Harvest, etc)

Wisconsin DNR: Baiting and Feeding Regulations

HUNT FOR THE HUNGRY

ESPN Outdoors 2005-2006 Whitetail Forecast

Hunt Wisconsin Whitetail Deer with a 12 lb Mtn Howitzer Cannon

WIS DEER & TURKEY EXPO, Madison Wi, 3/31 - 4/1-2 2006

IL DEER & TURKEY CLASSIC, Bloomington IL, 2/24 - 2/26 2006

Deer Hunting - Gun (Wisconsin)

I am back from opening weekend of deer gun hunting in Wisconsin. I went up Thursday night, then spent Friday sighting in my gun with a new scope and baiting up a few stands. The new scope is a Bushnell Trophy 3-9 x 45 variable power and seems to be a good replacement for my old 4 power fixed. No excuses this year.


Our buddy Larry helped me out sighting in the gun and I helped him out getting his truck unstuck when his 4 wheel drive went out. Outside of a 4 pointer we saw on Friday while baiting up the stands, the only buck anyone saw was an 8 pointer that Larry saw and then shot with an impressive 200 yard shot across a field. The deer dropped on the spot.


The rest of us only saw does and fawns; I saw 15 total over Saturday and Sunday. Then back home on Sunday & back to work. We'll see what happens the second part of the week when I get back up there.

Wow. Flash Time-Lapse Figure Drawing

Check it out: Link

Volleyball

Tina is starting Fusion Volleyball Camp pretty soon. I'll post her schedule when I find it, but I believe her first match is in early December. This is her 2nd year of Fusion in the off-season, but last year she was in the traveling league and this year she is in the Regional league. This means she doesn't travel as far away for matches, but it also means she doesn't get bus rides anymore... she has to get her own rides to and from the matches. That will be interesting with Bonnie & I working all the time. Anyway, hope she continues to do well and show interest... maybe she can get a scholarship out of it. I hope so as we may have a small school's tuition into it by the time she graduates.

My mini blog rant

Wow, there sure are some weirdos out there. No offense, but when I just start clicking the "Next Blog" button on the top right of my blog, I pass through some almighty frickin strange places. Now, I don't usually judge... well, yes actually I do... but it seems like there are just a couple basic types of blogs out there:
1) Religious
2) Political
3) Family
4) Pornographic
Is that it? Occasionally I stumble across a blog or two that are exceptionally funny, interesting, or informative. The rest pretty much suck. Now I understand that most or at least many of these blogs are for personal use by friends, family, or a small club or group. I say go ahead and do what you want to do, whatever you need to do, and whatever turns you on. But if you are creating something for the rest of the world to enjoy, why don't you step it up a notch. Try to make things interesting. And why do you remove the little "Next Blog" button on the top of your blog? Are you trying to end my exploration at your site? Do you think I will just stop and say, "Well, I guess I can't go any further so I may as well stay here and read whatever this person wrote"? (you know, I really just click the Back button and then click the last blog's "Next Blog" button again because you know what... it takes me to a whole new blog, far, far away from your dead-end blog.)

Ahhhh, it sure is fun to rant once in a while. :-)

Real Estate - Good or Bad?

I was wondering what everyone's thought was about real estate investing in general as well as the specific outlook right now. Have you had good or bad experiences? What was your specific investment process... did you buy property to rent out, or did you buy property to fix-up and resell, or did you do something completely different?

What do you think... rates are going up, the housing market will cool off. Buy a property now (say a duplex), do some minor fix-up work and get it ready to rent. When people stop buying because the rates are too high and rentals become more popular, you'll be ready to go. Make sense: yes or no?

You don't want to have a property sitting idle with no rent coming in, and you don't want to rent out a property for less than your mortgage payment. Have you heard of people who live in a house for 2 years and then move to a new house and rent out their old one? There is some deal there with refinancing and not paying capital gains tax if you lived in a house for 2+ years I believe. Does anyone have more information on this?

Has anyone done any foreclosure investing? If so, when do you get involved... when the property owners are first notified, when the bank takes possession, some other time? What are the pluses and deltas/minuses of foreclosure investing?

Real Estate is the single best investment out there... just ask Donald Trump, Dolf Deroos, and Rich Dad's Robert Kiyosaki to name a few. Has anyone gone through one of these "experts" courses? Has anyone had success following one of these courses?

Ipod Nano Update

I talked to the person who referred me to the Free IPod Nano program yesterday. He said he was just notified that I had completed my offer, and I was the number 5 person to referred from his link. He is going to let me know when his Nano arrives so I can give everyone here an update. If you want to get your IPod Nano, click here. More to come...

Charlie Brown Pathetic Tree

Wow, the updates are coming in hot and heavy now.
Its almost Christmas, so get your very own Charlie Brown Pathetic Christmas Tree. Gotta love it.

Is your system backed up?

Bonus clip of the day:
Watch this funny clip starring John Cleese and you too can avoid Backup Trauma.

ImplosionWorld!

Every feel like blowing stuff up? Watching clips of building implosions and explosions at Implosionworld.com might give you the quick fix you need. I feel better already...

Link of the Day

So I crossed to the darkside today and put a Google Ad-Sense ad on the site. It is small and unobtrusive and probably will do nothing for me, so I will probably remove it in a short time, but at least I will be able to see what the hype is about.

Anyway... something fun, something fun... oh here you go. Let's start a favorite link of the day, or more likely a favorite link whenever I get around to it. Today's favorite link was found while I was randomly surfing and I honestly don't even know where it cam from to give credit where credit is due... because this is great: Need a Doctor?.

See I told you it was great.

IPod Nano's for Everyone!

OK people. I want an IPod Nano for FREE. Hmmm, well don't we all? I have the deal to get one and you can get one too:

1) Click this link: http://ipodnanos.freepay.com/?r=24012828,
2) sign in and complete one offer out of about 15 choices (I signed up for the Credit Monitoring, as I was going to sign up for it anyway, but now I can get a free IPod Nano along with the deal!)
3) Have five other people sign up using your referral and when they each complete a deal you get you IPod Nano shipped to you.

You may think this is a scam, but I have some friends who run another site and they have already received IPods, IPod Nanos, and some other stuff (they have multiple offers running on their site, but I am starting out with just the Nano because its cool. Check out the specs here.)

You can sign up or not, but either way, check back here and I'll let you know how my experience goes.

People Eating Tasty Animals

Talk about some wackos. I hope they spoil and get thrown in the garbage...
Does any other group do the kind of retarded stunts that PETA comes up with? The only good thing about PETA is the "I'd rather wear nothing than wear fur" campaign.

Boycott Sony

I read today that Sony has been including software (rootkits) on some of its music CDs which installs itself to Windows operating systems when the cd is inserted into a PCs cd-rom drive. The files and installation are undetectable and there was no method to remove these files and no documentation explaing the existence of these files or this process in their End User License Agreements (EULA). They have now included a method for removing this software on their web site, but this only came about after the rootkits were discovered and negative media attention ensued. Basically Sony is resorting to hacking in their quest to track songs and reduce piracy. It seems to me that Sony is no better, in fact even worse, than the people who share music "illegally". Here is the article as posted at NewsFactor.com:

---
Sony has admitted that it included a stealth rootkit on some music CDs shipped in 2005 and has issued an update to remove the hidden software one day after it was discovered. The company had drawn criticism from security experts who warned that the technology could serve as a tool for hackers.
The nearly undetectable monitoring utility, part of the company's digital-rights management (DRM) technology, was aimed at preventing consumers from producing illegal copies of CDs. The software installed itself automatically in Windows systems whenever a CD was inserted. Any files contained in the rootkit are invisible and almost impossible to remove.

Security expert Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals discovered the hidden rootkit and posted his findings on the company blog on November 1st. Russinovich wrote that although he checked in his system's Add or Remove Programs list, as well as on the vendor's site and on the CD itself, he could not find uninstall instructions. Nor, he says, could he find any mention of it in the End User License Agreement (EULA).

Stealth Tactics

A rootkit is a set of tools commonly used by hackers to circumvent antivirus software and control a computer system. Most rootkits are engineered so that common PC monitoring mechanisms cannot detect them. The rootkits are designed to tuck themselves in to the most basic level of the operating system and remain hidden from users.

A Finnish antivirus company, F-Secure , reported that it had spent several weeks recently trying to find the cause of some unknown files reported by a user who suspected an audio CD as the cause.

Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer at F-Secure, said hackers could use the rootkit to insert their own files by inserting a simple command at the beginning of the file name that would render them undetectable by most antivirus software. On the F-Secure blog, Hyppönen wrote that he heard rumors that Universal is using the same DRM system on its audio CDs.

Privacy? What Privacy?

Although industry analysts said they cannot fault Sony's motives, some saw the company's initial failure to disclose the hidden technology as a violation of U.S. copyright laws. According to Jared Carleton, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan, Sony is overstepping the fair-use clause that gives consumers the right to make backup copies.

"[Sony] is saying, 'No, we are not going to pay attention to U.S. copyright law that's been generally accepted for the past 30 years,' " he said.

Carleton likened the hidden DRM to malware, and said it was no different than adware and spyware. He said that if Sony was shipping DRM-protected CDs, the company needed to put a notice on its packaging. Consumers understand that artists should be paid for their music, he said, but he added that consumers don't like this type of secrecy.

Andrew Jaquith, senior security analyst at Yankee Group, said the company behaved badly and that there could be a backlash. He said that the desire to protect intellectual property is understandable, but that Sony should have been upfront about its DRM technology, and would have been better off using industry-standard software.

"I haven't seen a single positive comment about this and it makes them look at little slimy," Jaquith said. "They should have been above-board and should have used software that they hadn't cobbled together themselves."

On the Web page containing the update, which enables users to detect and remove the rootkit, Sony said its technology did not pose a security risk. "This component is not malicious and does not compromise security," the company's post said. "However to alleviate any concerns that users may have about the program posing potential security vulnerabilities, this update has been released to enable users to remove this component from their computers."

The fix can be downloaded at http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/updates.html.
---

I say Ban Sony and all of their products. With the increase in the number of lawsuits from the RIAA against parents and grandparents for a couple of songs that their kids or grandkids have downloaded (in many cases downloaded songs where the cd is already owned by the downloader), the whole music business is showing its big-bully and mob-like mentality of scare tactics to produce its intended results. Sony is one conglomerate that I will avoid everytime I have a choice from now on.

Tso Much for Lunch

OK, I went to lunch today with a bunch of old co-workers. Not that they were up there in years, I just used to work with them and don't anymore. As we are all tech guys, and we had already discussed the latest gossip, someone threw out that they wondered who General Tso was. Well, of course with tech people these types of questions can not go unanswered so one of them looked General Tso up when they got back from lunch. As it is actually kind of interesting and I would bet most people do not know who or where this came from, I will repost the article from the Washington Post here. Thanks to Steve for wasting his time at work to look this up:

Who Was General Tso And Why Are We Eating His Chicken?

By Michael Browning

Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, April 17, 2002; Page F01

Each evening, thousands of Americans drift into Chinese restaurants or, if they are too lazy to go out, pick up the phone and order one of the most popular dishes on the menu: General Tso's Chicken, a sugary-spicy melange of dark-meat tidbits, deep-fried then fired up with ginger, garlic, sesame oil, scallions and hot chili peppers.

Not one in 10,000 knows who General Tso (most commonly pronounced "sow") was, nor what terrible times he lived through, nor the dark massacres that distinguished his baleful, belligerent career. Setting their chopsticks aside, patting their stomachs, the satisfied diners spare scarcely a thought for General Tso, except to imagine that he must have been a great connoisseur of hot stir-fried chicken.

Who was he?

General Tso Tsungtang, or as his name is spelled in modern Pinyin, Zuo Zongtang, was born on Nov. 10, 1812, and died on Sept. 5, 1885. He was a frighteningly gifted military leader during the waning of the Qing dynasty, a figure perhaps the Chinese equivalent of the American Civil War commander William Tecumseh Sherman. He served with brilliant distinction during China's greatest civil war, the 14-year-long Taiping Rebellion, which claimed millions of lives.

Tso was utterly ruthless. He smashed the Taiping rebels in four provinces, put down an unrelated revolt called the Nian Rebellion, then marched west and reconquered Chinese Turkestan from Muslim rebels.

Arthur W. Hummel devotes five double-columned pages to the general in the monumental 1944 "Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (1644-1912)" published by the Library of Congress.

Tso emerges from several sources as a self-made man, born in Hunan province, a hilly hot-tempered heartland, whose cuisine rivals that of Sichuan for sheer firepower. (While Sichuan food is hot right up front, in the mouth, in your face; Hunanese cuisine tends to build up inside you, like a slow charcoal fire, until you feel as though your belly is filled with burning coals.)

As a young man Tso flunked the official court exams three times, a terrible disgrace. He returned home, married and devoted himself to practical studies, like agriculture and geography. He took up silkworm farming and tea farming and chose a gentle sobriquet, calling himself "The Husbandman of the River Hsiang." Like Sherman, stuck teaching at a military academy in Louisiana on the eve of the Civil War, he seemed washed up.

He was 38 when the Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1850. For the rest of his life, Tso would wield the sword, becoming one of the most remarkably successful military commanders in Chinese history.

The Taiping Rebellion -- a movement that in part advocated Christian doctrine -- nearly toppled the Qing dynasty. It was founded by Hong Xiuquan, a Chinese mystic who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus. The whole astonishing episode has been described admirably by Yale scholar Jonathan Spence in his "God's Chinese Son." (Norton, 1996).

Tso made war, and war made Tso. He began his military career as an adjutant and secretary for the governor of Hunan province. He raised a force of 5,000 volunteers and took the field in September 1860, driving the Taiping rebels out of Hunan and Guangxi provinces, into coastal Zhejiang. There he captured the big cities of Shaoxing, still famous for its sherrylike rice wine. From there he pushed south into Fujian and Guangdong provinces, where the revolt had first begun and spread, and had crushed the Taipings by the time the rebellion ended in 1864.

The Taiping Rebellion was the greatest upheaval in 19th century China. It caused massive displacements and shifts in population. Hundreds of thousands of people fled or emigrated, many to America, where they worked building the transcontinental railroad, which was completed in 1869.

It would be possible to leave the story here and say that General Tso's Chicken simply honors a great personality, just as Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, is honored in Beef Wellington; Pavel Stroganoff, a 19th-century Russian diplomat, in Beef Stroganoff; Count Charles de Nesselrode (another 19th-century Russian diplomat) in Nesselrode Pudding,; or Australian opera singer Nellie Melba in the dessert, Peach Melba. Indeed some believe it quite likely that the dish was whipped up for the general after some signal victory, just as Chicken Marengo was whipped up for Napoleon after he defeated the Austrians at Marengo on June 14, 1800.

Still, the recipe is not particularly original -- the ingredients are used in many stir-fry Chinese dishes -- and the dark meat chicken argues for a humbler origin. It's a poor man's dish, not a feast for a field marshal.

Is it possible that, struggling to carve out a new life in America under backbreaking adversities, and having heard of the sword skills of the remorseless General Tso (who had the top leaders of the Nian Rebellion executed with the proverbial "death of 10,000 cuts"), the overseas exiles indulged in some gallows-humor about their old enemy? That the chopped-up chicken dish may have gotten its name from the sliced and diced victims of Tso's grim reprisals?

This might conceivably explain why General Tso's Chicken is very much an overseas Chinese dish, filtering the hot, peppery taste of Hunan cuisine, through the sweetening process of Cantonese cooking. Most of the immigrants to America came from coastal regions: Shanghai and Canton.

Tso Much For That

The details of Tso's life are easy to document. But how the chicken got named for him is another matter. In "Chinese Kitchen" (Morrow, 1999), author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo says that dish is a Hunan classic called "chung ton gai," or "ancestor meeting place chicken."

But to others, General Tso's chicken recipe may be no more ancient than 1972, and may have more in common with Manhattan than with mainland China. On "The Definitive General Tso's Chicken Page" (www.echonyc.com/~erich/tso.htm) New Yorker Eric Hochman theorizes "It was invented in the mid-1970s, in NYC, by one Chef Peng.

"Around 1974, Hunan and Szechuan food were introduced to the city, and General Tso's Chicken was an exemplar of the new style. Peng's, on East 44th Street, was the first restaurant in NYC to serve it, and since the dish (and cuisine) were new, Chef Peng was able to make it a House Specialty, in spite of its commonplace ingredients."

My own research led me to the same city, but a different Manhattan restaurateur, who claims the dish is the brilliant invention of his former partner, a gifted Chinese immigrant chef named T.T. Wang.

"He went into business with me in 1972," said Michael Tong, owner of New York's Shun Lee Palaces, East (155 E. 55th St.) and West (43 W. 65th St.). "We opened the first Hunanese restaurant in the whole country, and the four dishes we offered you will see on the menu of practically every Hunanese restaurant in America today. They all copied from us.

"First, Lake Tung Ting shrimp. Lake Tung Ting in northern Hunan province is very famous for its shrimp.

"Second, crispy sea bass. We roll them in cornstarch and we fry them crispy. Then we shower them with the sauce. A lot of restaurants will use catfish, but they don't know how to cook them in the sauce, so they put the sauce on the side. Sometimes they just give you plain soy sauce. We know how to cook them in the sauce.

"Third, orange crispy beef. This is very, very popular with us. Any Hunan or Sichuan restaurant, if you call them and ask for orange crispy beef, they will know what you are talking about. We invented it.

"Fourth, General Tso's chicken, sometimes called General Tsung's chicken or General Tsao's chicken."

If Tong's tale is true, General Tso never ate the dish named after him. The great warrior, the prop of the Qing dynasty, the subduer of rebels and uprisings who carved his name into Chinese history at the point of a sword, had to wait more than 100 years for an inventive expatriate chef to award him his American triumph and make his name famous in the West.

General Tso, most likely, was a man ahead of his dish.

Michael Browning is a feature writer for the Palm Beach Post. He spent nine years in China as a correspondent, based in Beijing, for Knight-Ridder newspapers.

The Great Outdoors

So I went bowhunting up in Northern Wisconsin last weekend. How many deer did I see while hunting? Zero.

I saw deer... just not while I was up in my stand with my bow. At least I brought my new camera and got some great photos. I saw several deer,



some eagles...









some turkeys...






and some great scenery...
















Apparently the eagle shown above had eaten too much and was too full to fly from the area. He sat on the ground for a day, and then sat in that tree for another day and a half before finally taking off. I didn't know they did that, but we reported the eagle as possibly injured to a biologist from the Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources, and that was what she thought was going on. She said she had studied eagles before and this is a fairly common occurrence.