my favourite fizzy drink brands

Below are my favourite fizzy drink brands. I've tasted a number of flavoured carbonated beverages over the years, but few have provided the exquisite experience of power, strength and character such as these, making for an event best enjoyed when drinking in small, delicate sips. And with the appropriate palate

Ting is a carbonated beverage popular in the Caribbean. It is flavoured with St. Kitt's or Jamaican grapefruit juice (from concentrate), and is both tart and sweet. It comes in a green glass bottle, or more rarely in a green and yellow can. Like Orangina, the beverage contains a small amount of sediment consisting of grapefruit juice pulp. Ting is produced under licence by Cott Beverages.

Doogh is a yogurt-based beverage popular in Iran, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Armenia. It is made by beating unflavoured yogurt until smooth, and then diluting with water to a consistency similar to whole milk. Salt (and sometimes pepper) is aded, and commonly dried mint is mixed in as well. Carbonation is achieved by letting it ferment. Doogh is generally served chilled or over ice.

Mitsuya Cider is a Japanese carbonated drink created in 1884 and now produced by Asahi Soft Drinks. Its basic flavour is somewhat similar to sprite but less sweet. Additional flavours also available include grape, lemon, mikan and white peach. On occasions, Mitsuya Cider releases its "White Cider" variation, which may come with its own alternate flavour: white cider with melon.

Mitsuya Cider used to be sold exclusively in ornately decorated metal bottles, but is now produced primarily in plastic. The vintage metal bottles are still available for nostalgic customers.

when the backslide creeps in

I'm not religious, but chose to observe Lent this year as the cleansing for which its practiced. I maintained. I could have been stronger, sharper, more disciplined. I stayed strong even after Lent was done but sadly about ten or so days after, I fell into one bad habit and a few days after that, gave myself *permission* to fold on another. Earlier last week I took stock of myself and said, "Wait, you can stop these bad habits. You just did it before." As such, I'm starting up again, though on one of the habits I still fall victim to, yet never curbed during Lent, I decided to nip that one in the bud, seeing as it's a far greater vice of mine and one I realised led to the other two.

It's going well so far. Beyond realising I don't need it, I'm finding I don't miss it. Before going down that rabbit hole, let alone knowing there was a rabbit hole at all, I had gone without it for years. Though it's not drug related, it might as well be.

eating out by oneself

So yesterday I'm minding my lunch at my daily diner

Eating alone in a restaurant. Not everyone can do it. (obviously everyone can do it under circumstances where they are actually hungry and they have to eat and that's where the food is)

But to do it and enjoy being there, by yourself, is not something that most people are fond of. Such ordeal, such rite-of-passage, was featured in Sopranos Season 6, when Tony went out to Las Vegas. Tony was a little awkward but he "leaned in" and got his food.

Can you sit there in a restaurant by yourself and get a meal and not be awkward?

I used to do that not long ago, once in awhile in country style diners, in my younger, travelling years. It was a thing to do, like Jack Kerouac wrote about it and stuff. He would get big peach pies in Iowa. I don't think peaches grow locally there, but they probably do now, some varietals. (peach trees can be grown anywhere, they just won't yield.) Kerouac was awkward to the point of being paralysed with schizo anxiety. That's a basic fact of his bio, but it wasn't a selling point for his book, nor the cult of personality that (briefly) built up around him. There's a recent movie called On The Road I was going to watch but the trailer is unappealing. And it makes it look like they really miss, who those guys were. To call them tragic heroes is charitable.

In any case I am not comfortable sitting at a diner, among locals whom I don't know. Pre-covid, post-covid, now, whenever.

I took a trip with my father ten years ago (God bless his resting soul) to our own version of the Dirty South, and we stopped at this diner and I got the most excellent Southern fried meal — literally chicken fried steak — and I thought it was an authentic local diner "that we discovered" and I suppose it was, but it turned out to be something akin to Huddle House. Right. A couple years ago Huddle House was in the news for having one of their waitstaff murdered, on the job and in cold blood, and then - wait for it - not having the good grace to close for the remainder of the business day. Levels of insensitivity that shouldn't even be possible.

EAP-TSL

Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is an authentication framework for network and internet connections. Providing the transport and usage of material and parameters generated by EAP methods, it only defines the information from the interface and the formats. Each protocol that uses EAP defines a way to encapsulate by the user EAP messages within that protocol's messages. Examples of standards that use EAP include WPA and WPA2.

EAP Transport Layer Security (EAP-TLS), defined in RFC 5216, is an IETF open standard that uses the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, and is well-supported among wireless vendors. EAP-TLS is the original, standard wireless LAN EAP authentication protocol, which calls for both a client's and a server's certificate. Therefore it requires mutual authentication using client-side X.509 certificates without giving the option to disable the requirement.

The requirement for a client-side certificate, however unpopular it may be, is what gives EAP-TLS its authentication strength and illustrates the classic convenience vs. security trade-off. With a client-side certificate, a compromised password is not enough to break into EAP-TLS enabled systems because the intruder still needs to have the client-side certificate; indeed, a password is not even needed, as it is only used to encrypt the client-side certificate for storage. The highest security available is when the "private keys" of client-side certificate are housed in smart cards. This is because there is no way to steal a client-side certificate's corresponding private key from a smart card without stealing the card itself. It is more likely that the physical theft of a smart card would be noticed (and the smart card immediately revoked) than a (typical) password theft would be noticed. In addition, the private key on a smart card is typically encrypted using a PIN that only the owner of the smart card knows, minimizing its utility for a thief even before the card has been reported stolen and revoked.

Native Command Queuing

In computing, Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is a technique supported by the Serial ATA protocol, which lets hard disk drives decide the sequence in which read and write commands are executed, thus reducing the amount of unnecessary drive head movement. Use of this resource results in less wear of the drive for workloads comprised of several simultaneous read/write requests. By using detailed knowledge of time to search for requests and rotation position, the drive can calculate a better order to perform the required operations. This results in a decrease in the amount of useless request retrievals in the drive head and better performance overall for reduced disk use.

A note on what the left considers "privilege"

I've come to the realisation that the word "privilege" has undergone a severe process of bastardisation over the past decades. At least the way its usage is currently applied in the west.

Taking into account the Christian perspective, there is no such thing as privilege (as in the way it's worded nowadays); rather, the plenty with which a person or family has is a blessing. All that we are, all that we have achieved and all that we possess is granted from the Holy Father. It's tantamount to when Jesus told Pilate: you would have no power if not granted from above. This was lost on Pilate who was too sidled up in his comfy  luxurious stance in life; too attached to the material and his own indulgences.

Even in want, the gift of salvation, the very promise of a saviour to redeem humanity is more than we deserve and our worth. The secular world calls this privilege, but the pious and the devoted know it is a blessing granted from God. Now and then John 3:16 is said in unsuitable or rather, cliched moments, but that's nevertheless what John was driving at - despite our inherent leaning towards evil, God still saw enough in humanity and the world and decided it was worth saving.

On potato peeling

Some of the potatoes I grew this year were Adirondack Reds. This sort constitutes a red purple type of potato that is really appealing to my tasting senses; medium yields and their skins were pretty blighted and splotchy. They also have to be entirely peeled, rather than some of the others which are are required. If given the choice, it's far preferable to not need peel your potatos because it means both less work and more food. but at times peeling the rind is unavoidable.

By chance encounter, I've recently come across an old acquaintance of mine and the potato talk came up. He told me that he prefers to peel his potatos Russian style, which means using a knife. He also went on to expound on how it's the only way to do it, if your priority is to get the most out of the potato in exchange for the time and energy undertaken for growing them. And how peeling them in such a manner is a practiced skill. And once peeled, they go into a container with cold water, kept in the fridge for a couple days.

I'd never guess that there were named methods of peeling potatos, as I've only ever relied on the usual potato peeler. Granted, i'd make use of a standard kitchen knife now and then, but my go-to-option had always been the potato peeler. It's also come in handy for peeling any thin-skinned vegetable. I'd even use it on garlic for a thin slice.

When I give myself the luxury of a steak, I prefer a baked potato -soaked in butter and spice. On the other hand, I have found out that mashed potatoes go great with chicken. I can take or leave wth gravy- usually doing without the gravy, but with butter. I have on occasion been lazy and have used the prepacked mashed taters. I'd only resort to them when making my homemade version of KFC's chicken bowl, which usually consists of a layer of mashers, corn, chicken and cheese.