The Reverend AIDGnarl has inadvertently issued the ol’ Reverend Brown a challenge:

40 days, 40 burgers.

As a matter of convenience and consistency, I’ll be cooking from a box of frozen 1/4lb hamburger patties, and using bulk-bought hamburger rolls. While they may not be the most flavorful, they will instead serve as a vehicle for the wonderland of toppings that I will subject them to. It’ll let the toppings shine with the glory of heaven.

40 variations, 40 days of bliss.

My heartfelt thanks to the Cheese & Burger Society for the inspiration and mouthwatering burger delights.

A little preview of what I’m on about…

The Blue Reverend

Let me get a few burgers under my belt and we’ll hit it. Together. You and me. I don’t mind saying that coming up with 40 variations is not exactly easy. I’m up to 23 at the moment, but I’ll hit 40, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.

The Six of Diamonds

Found this little gem recently. I wouldn’t mind having the whole deck, but alas, only the Six of Diamonds was able to be captured. The rest have presumably gone to ground. Always nice to have something new for the shooting range.

Ah… I guess everyone has these nights. I felt no compulsion to cook anything. I also don’t desire to spend the money on something prepared, as that’s often lacking, or at least rather expensive. That leads me to… the freezer.

Found me an arm roast, two pounds. Thawed it out and fired up the cast iron skillet. Pan fried it to medium rare. Sliced and tossed with some BBQ sauce, paired up with a side of rice. Not a bad bit of sustenance. Time elapsed: one episode of Boston Legal.

I think the data speaks for itself.

I have to say goodbye to an old friend today. Born September 5th, 2003, Y3KC1QQE undertook the brave journey from Singapore to the United States to be in my employ for most of his life. He was the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB ATA/133 HDD, and I am proud to have kept my data with him.

Fortunately for me, I knew his health was ailing and made sure that the data was backed up a few months ago. It’s likely that the ailing hard drive was also the cause of some intermittent system failures on what should otherwise be a perfectly healthy computer.

A few mornings ago, upon boot up, I received something along the lines of an operating system not found error. This puzzled me, since it was a fresh install of the Windows 7 RC, but now I know it’s because the already failed hard drive (and yes, I forgot it was installed) came back to life, zombified, and the bios inserted it first into the boot order.

Wups.

Now it’s kind of silly that I had reformatted and reinstalled Windows on what I considered the main drive, but what’s done is done.

Y3KC1QQE, you were a trustworthy storage unit for five good years, and were one of my first 100GB+ hard drives. However, shameful though it is to admit, you won’t be missed. There’s a new kid in town that Samsung sent over, and he has 10x the capacity you did.  Goodnight, sweet prince.

Being a bachelor has its perks. Sure, single income’s a bitch, and I can’t pass off chores on the wife, but them’s the breaks. For my trouble, I get to pursue my batshit crazy tech projects. Today, for example.

The cast:

• Two year old computer, built for video games
  • Core 2 Duo E6500
  • Geforce 8800 GTS 320mb
  • ~1 TB hard disk
  • 2 GB ram
• Widescreen Hanns-G LCD Monitor, turned clockwise 90
• Wall-mount fixture
• Wireframe table, 26″ tall
• 25 feet of DVI to HDMI cable
• Glass of decent whiskey

Plenty of other components, but you get the idea. I was formerly using an 8 year old machine, stuffed into a Shuttle XPC 41G, but I found that when using a web browser, MP3 playback would skip. Needless to say, video playback was rancid.

Oh, but what’s the point of all this junk? It’s my armchair console, of course. I loaded the Windows 7 RC onto it this morning, being that I detest Windows XP and Vista is an unstable pile of doo doo berries. It’s for my day to day web browsing, which was handled by my MacBook Pro until the power cable melted. It does my music CD ripping, since the 8 year old computer takes a half hour per disc. It plays the music since it doesn’t skip a beat when running Mozilla products at the same time.

The best part, the original intention, inspiration if you will: it’s the perfect comic book reader. The full size of the widescreen monitor turned on end displays the full page, entirely readable and with no scrolling. Bliss.

Yes, that does mean the screen is attached via a wall mount to the wireframe table. The arrangement is not currently ideal, but I’ll get there. I’ve discovered in the last hour or so that looking to the side is a recipe for neck pain. Tomorrow I may do a little more shifting of hardware.

As a bonus, I can send anything over to the big television over the fireplace. I prefer the Xbox360 for video gaming these days, but there’s still more than a few PC classics that I wouldn’t mind hitting up again, from time to time.