Travel Warrior Chunk Chicken Noodles

Here's another dinner that's simple to fix on the road (with a kitchen). After I stop at a store to pick up chicken breasts (one of the few foods Karston will eat) and a small bag of mixed frozen vegetables (or fresh, depending on the season), I can make this comfort food. Cale will often eat a lot of green beans, so between Cale and this soup, we can finish a bag of frozen green beans in a few days.

1 pkg creamy chicken ramen noodles

1 to 2 cup mixed vegetables (corn, bell peppers, green beans, or whatever you like; fresh or frozen), diced

1/2 to 1 cup chicken, diced

I started from this Ramen Fried "Rice" recipe, so once again, you can tell I can't follow a recipe.

On the same theme of ramen noodles as the basis of a quick and simple meal, how about beef-broccoli (maximum 1/2 lb steak maybe restaurant leftover and pick up a head of broccoli), hot and sour soup (add julienned squash, green onions, and bamboo shoots if available), tuna casserole (add parsley if available), spinach-chicken casserole (use 1 pkg ramen and twice as much spinach by weight as chicken), or yatsobi (with half or less of the meat, and probably double the veggies).

Travel Warrior Oriental Beef and Noodles Dinner

Here's another dinner, Oriental Beef and Noodles, that's simple to pack for my family, but with fewer leftovers (sometimes none) than the spaghetti.

1 package ramen noodles, oriental flavor

1/2 pound ground beef (maybe leftover from spaghetti)

1 15 oz can diced tomatoes

1 small package frozen corn (freezer pack for the cooler, then use immediately)

Surprisingly yummy!

Travel Warrior Spaghetti Dinner

When we travel as a family, it's often nice to have a destination-cooked meal (since it's not home-cooked at home) without having to stop at a grocery store for supplies. We almost always stay somewhere with a small kitchen (kids need juice that needs a refrigerator), including pots, a can opener, and a stove. One of the easiest is spaghetti, except that I dislike commercially jarred spaghetti sauce for having too much sugar.

For the sauce, combine and heat:

1 29 oz can of crushed tomatoes

1 15 oz can of diced tomatoes with green peppers and onions

1 4 oz can of diced mushrooms, drained and rinsed

When we have the space, I add dried oregano, garlic powder, and a few shakes of habañero sauce. If we stop at a store, we add 1/2 pound ground beef (or a leftover hamburger from a restaurant).

Boil spaghetti according to the package directions.

Voilà, one spaghetti dinner! Since I pack the entire 1-pound package of spaghetti, we usually get four meals out of this. For us, this is better when we're traveling with another family so the leftovers aren't so oppressive.

Lion Annoyances

I'm not ready to install Lion on all of my Macs, but it came on my new MacBook Pro at work. Yesterday, Time Machine was a fantastic way to get my applications, files, and preferences from the old laptop to the new! Now comes the more tedious task of making friends with Lion.

First up, the scroll wheel on my mouse scrolled in the wrong direction! I don't want to change everything else (older Mac OS X and Linux) to match, so I had to change Lion's default behavior. Apple menu > System Preferences > Mouse, un-check "Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating." Whew!

After that, I'm making friends with Apple's Lion.

Clothes Make the Girl

Since the start of this calendar year, I've lost about 10 pounds, and just recently people have started to remark to me that I look as though I've lost weight.

Initially, I had two theories. One was simply that a ten-pound weight loss shows. The other theory was that I'm wearing different, smaller clothes now. (No, I have not bought a new wardrobe! I don't enjoy shopping, and clothes shopping is probably the worst form; furthermore most prêt à porter doesn't flatter me) Now that I've heard the remarks a number of times, I can report that all, yes all, of the compliments are when I'm wearing smaller clothes. These are clothes I wore in high school, somewhat worn but they fit well again. Not new and sharp (although I'm sure that would work too!), but old and at least somewhat figure-flattering.

Although I did both, I have to say that dressing to look smaller is more effective to get others to notice than being smaller.

On a similar tangent, clothes that fit well are more comfortable and generally make you more confident in your appearance leading to overall improved confidence. Knowing you look good leads to feeling good. And that's why I can sometimes drag myself out to buy clothes.

IPv6 and Solaris 9

Since static IPv6 on Solaris 9 wasn't fun enough on its own, it turns out that my Solaris 9 servers start losing a lot of IPv6 packets after a reboot. The problem appears to be in.ndpd (what should be the IPv6 neighbor discovery protocol daemon, but appears primarily to be IPv6 routing instead), and syslog reports in.ndpd[PID]: [ID 302683 daemon.error] router_add_k: RTM_ADD (interface bge0): Network is unreachable RTM_ADD every 1 to 5 minutes.

The fix is to shut down IPv6 (it's not working anyway, so go ahead) and then restore IPv6; the only difference is that in.ndpd isn't running. However, just TERMinating in.ndpd isn't enough for IPv6 traffic to flow freely. Try this instead:

# kill in.ndpd

ps -ef | grep ndp

sudo kill -TERM 11292

# bring down the IPv6 interfaces

sudo ifconfig -a6

sudo ifconfig bge0:1 inet6 down unplumb

sudo ifconfig bge0 inet6 down unplumb

sudo ifconfig lo0 inet6 down unplumb

# flush IPv6 routes

sudo route flush -inet6

# verify that IPv6 is gone

sudo ifconfig -a6

netstat -nr

# restore IPv6 interfaces

sudo ifconfig lo0 inet6 plumb up

sudo ifconfig bge0 inet6 plumb up

sudo ifconfig bge0:1 inet6 plumb up your:ipv6:address::here/64

# verify interfaces

sudo ifconfig -a6

sudo ifconfig -a

# restore default IPv6 route

sudo route add -inet6 default your:ipv6:default:router::here

# verify route table

netstat -nr

I'm trying to stay off my diatribe soap box here, but I'm happy that Solaris 9 will be replaced with RHEL 6 in the coming months.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Mail.app

Every previous time I've tried to use Mail.app before, I've gone running back to Thunderbird usually within a day. This time, thanks to a large monitor (so I leave Mail.app in the 3-pane single window more so that keyboard navigation works) and this tip on adding Gmail-like shortcuts to Mail.app using Quicksilver, and this tip to color a Mail message, I don't miss Thunderbird, I have better Exchange integration (ugh), I'm not reaching for the mouse too often, and I can now view graphic attachments like PDFs inline.

Quicksilver is awesome! AppleScript gets the job done, and consequently now Mail.app gets the job done too.