rob was here.

Peanut butter is one of those super familiar foods that's in all sorts of snacks and you eat all the time (unless, of course, you're one of those people who can't eat peanuts). A recent event informed me that other types of nuts can be made into respective butters as well! That recent event being when they came home with the groceries today.

Readers, I give you: almond butter!

Yep.. Two new nut-butters found their way into the fridge today.. almond butter and hazelnut butter.. So far I've tried the almond butter and I'm very impressed! Who even knew other nut-butters existed? I never even thought about it before now.. I guess I always assumed it wasn't possible to make nut-butters out of anything besides peanuts.

Anyways, here is the brand, in case you are interested in picking some up. I think it comes from the organic isle that everyone avoids. It appears you can get cashew-butter too.. I may have to try some of that.



nuts.

This post is sort of a follow-up to a problem I was complaining about a few weeks ago. I was raving about how Rogers are somehow filtering out bittorrent packets, resulting in very poor bittorrent speeds. I actually really didn't downloading anything for a couple of months.

Azureus recently changed all that with their latest version (2.4). They encrypt the data transfer between Azureus-to-Azureus connections. This means ISPs like Rogers can't find torrent-packets in transit and snuff them out of existence. They are pretty much flipping a middle internet-finger to the "man", where the "man" is Rogers.

If you are experiencing poor speeds with your bittorrent downloads, I recommend the new Azureus to cure what ails you.



azureus to teh rescue.

The other night I wanted to watch some of my favourite music videos, most of them being from the grunge-ish era (or whatever you want to call it). I guess two of my favourite videos are Nirvana's Teen Spirit and Heart-Shaped Box. I have a few medium quality mtv rips of these videos, but then I thought to myself:

self, remember a few months ago Apple started selling music videos from iTunes?

ummmm, yeah... Yeah I think so.

right. I bet they are high quality. You should probably think about buying them for the couple of bucks they cost or whatever. Then you'll have them forever.

well.. arn't we thinking about this now?

pardon? I wasn't paying attention.

Eventually I logged into iTunes and went into their Music Videos section. I entered 'Nirvana' into the search feild, and a list came up of their albums. Then I noticed the music store contained exactly zero music videos from the band. How could this be? Maybe the Nirvana video's arn't considered popular enough to warrent being sold on iTunes? This probably isn't so, as Teen Spirit is renound by all sorts of s to be one of the most acclaimed and influencial songs and videos of.. ever!

Slightly annoyed, I moved onto some other bands of the era. Pearl Jam. A few of their newer ones. Sounds Garden. Nope. Pumpkins. Nope. Alice in Chains. Nope. Arrrgh.

From looking at iTunes, maybe it's a political thing rather than a cold shoulder to the grunge genre. It appears that their library isn't well stocked retroactively. I guess the money is in selling current music videos by the hordes of identical 14-year-old rappers and rapperettes who will surely shape and shatter the music industry like the seattle sound did.

ugh.

they pull me back in.

it's no secret that I don't watch much TV. I absolutely hate sitcoms and 90% of the drudge that comes on TV (but to be fair, I don't give most of it much of a chance)..

Anyways, the few shows that really got me hooked during the last, say, 6 years or so are The Sopranos and Lost.. and Lost has been testing my patience lately!

With regards to the Sopranos; it has been a long time in the waiting for Season 6 to come upon us, but it's drawing close. It premiers a month from tonight (March 12th, 2006).. Now what am I getting at? Well, I recently found out about a little surprise from the creators of the show.

We all knew for a long time now that Season 6 would be shorter than the rest (10 shows instead of the usual 13), and would be the final season of the series. For a long time I have been very curious on how the show will conclude. I keep thinking back to an episode from one of the first seasons where Tony tells his psychiatrist:

"there are two ways out for guys like me.. the can or death."

foreshadowing? maybe. we will see.

Anyhow, to the point of this post. I recently heard (and apparently this is old news so I'm out of the loop) that HBO are producing 8 more episodes to be released in 2007, which will be the actual last tales of the series! That's awesome news for me! More of my favorite show.

Well, I've returned from europe after a successful week of work over in the land of Spain. It was quite an experience both professionally and personally, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to do something like that. I took my camera along and managed to see a few sights throughout the week, and pertake in the espanol culture (including a soup of pig-ears and beans which wasn't that great, and a set of pig-ribs cooked on an open fire pit which were pretty awesome).. I'll attempt to walk you through some of the pictures I took.

Ah.

the first night we arrived at the hotel in Madrid in the evening and it began to snow. A lot of the spanish people were amazed and apparently this doesn't happen very often (maybe a few days of the year if at all)... I took this opportunity to hit the streets up (which were alarmingly empty, I didn't find anyone out walking around, except for at bus-stops)











I got up early the next morning and did another walk before work. Here's an interesting picture: a palm-ish sort of tree still covered in snow from the night before.



Day 3, we again got up super early to make use of our off hours and we took the train to the centre of Madrid for some good ol' fashioned walkin' and gawkin'.







These next pictures are actually taken about an hour outside of Madrid, in the city/province of Segovia. We stopped there on route to Vigo/Marín where we would continue work. It was pretty amazing, lots of churches, cathedrals, and of course, the famous roman aqueducts.



the aqueducts:







There were many other interesting sights at which I didn't have my camera with me.. Mostly around the town of Marín in the region of Galicia. That region was much warmer, with such sights as hills full of orange and lemon trees in season, vinyards, and the city itself was quite beautiful nestled on the banks around a tranquil land-locked bay. Truely a good time.