RockDoggy’s Woodshop

Ingredients:
1 pork tenderloin (I buy at Costco, they’re about 12″ long)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup soy sauce
1-2 cloves minced garlic
1/2 tsp lemon juice

Directions:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees while preparing marinade & meat.

If you prefer, you can line your baking pan with aluminum foil for easier cleanup. Place meat in baking pan, and slice it lengthwise about 1/4″ to 1/2″ deep.

Combine all other ingredients, whisking them to emulsify the oil mixture a bit. Once mixed well, pour it over the meat, and place in oven uncovered.

Bake for around 45 minutes, or to desired doneness. I find 45 minutes at 375 degrees cooks the meat to 160 degrees without charring it or drying it out. Your mileage may vary depending on the size of your tenderloin and perhaps your altitude. I’m at about 500′ above sea level in Michigan, for what it’s worth.

When finished, remove from oven and let meat sit for a minute before cutting. I slice meat into 1/4″ to 1/2″ thick slices, place it on a serving platter and drizzle the remaining juices from the baking pan over the meat. Serves 4 easily. I like to serve with steamed jasmine rice and simple steamed vegetables like green beans.

Enjoy!

Yesterday morning, I left the laptop with about 5 hours to go to complete the Wubi installation. I didn’t count on my Father-in-law coming over three hours later, using the laptop, and closing it - thus hibernating it. He had no idea (uses my wife’s login) and I was beside myself after 20+ hours invested in it.

But amazingly, it must have found a burst of speed during that three hours, because it had completed up to the point that it required a reboot, which is an expected part of the Wubi installation. And, amazingly, it completed installing in short order after the reboot.

Now I have a working Ubuntu installation on my laptop. What I don’t have is wireless network access from it. I’ve looked into this, and it seems that there are some special hoops to jump through depending on your chipset. It would appear that you need to build a special driver for your flavor of wireless adapter. While this was less than seamless, I’d have to guess this is some of the fun you sign up for when you use Linux. I can live with that.

The difficult part is that it also appears that you need to get special firmware for the wireless adapter to work with Ubuntu. I haven’t yet been able to determine that this firmware will still work with Windows XP. Since the laptop is my wife’s primary machine, I’d rather not commit her to Ubuntu if I can avoid it yet. So until I can determine that 1) I don’t need the firmware update, or 2) it can coexist with Windows, I am reluctant to do it.

Another small challenge is to diagnose your problem at the same time as reading the docs on fixing it, when the machine in question has no internet access. It’s slower going than I’d like. But with four kids to pay attention to, carrying the laptop into the den with the desktop machine to work simultaneously. So here I sit: Ubuntu yes, network no.

Given this, and what appears to be “out of the box” support for a wired network connection, I’ve decided to continue the installation attempt on the desktop box while trying to figure out the wireless problem on the laptop.

Of course, it is currently estimating about 70 hours to completion at 2-3KB/second. I posted a question about this at the Ubuntu forums, but never got a response. Your mileage may vary, but at least that machine can be left alone to complete the installation no matter how long it takes. And the “pick up where you left off” feature that the installer has is a great help.

Here’s what I hope to be doing on Sunday…

Final assembly of the lower beds

That’s a picture of the beds I’ve been building for the kids. These are loft/bunk style beds, where they will fit together in an “L” shape. The high beds are lower than a typical bunk, which is why they must be in the “L” configuration. There will only be enough room under the high bed for the occupant of the lower bed to fit their feet under it. If they tried to put their head under there, aside from some claustrophobia, they’d probably crack their head on the underside of the high bed if they moved.

So the low beds are complete except for a finish, and the high beds are nearly ready for assembly. Some sanding is still required, and I still need to build the rails and the ladders. The plan is to put the finish on everything while I’m on vacation the week of Labor Day.

Once that is all done, the final phase of the project will be to build chests of drawers to fit under the exposed end of the high beds. Who knows how long that will take. It’s been most of a year to finish four beds!

OK, I couldn’t let it go.

Back to the laptop, I decided to click on the Wubi installer again. One feature I didn’t mention is that it’s able to resume a cancelled installation. So it picked up again at about 24%. It’s also downloading at twice the speed it was this morning. Of course, zero times two is still zero, right? But I’m willing to let it roll again.

Out of curiosity, I did a broadband speed check (during the install) just to make sure it wasn’t my connection. While I certainly wasn’t getting my alleged 6 megabits, I was just short of 2 megabits during the install. Plenty of leftover bandwidth.

So I can only assume the problem is with Wubi’s sudden popularity, though their forums don’t reflect much of a problem. Not sure what to think of that. But I think I’ll let this go, and see where we get to in the morning. According to the installer’s most recent estimate, I have 14.5 hours to go.

Well that was unsatisfying.

I tried the download on my little-used desktop after clearing 12.5 GB of space on it, and the downloads were similarly snail-ish. I killed it. I’ll dig on the Wubi site later, perhaps. But for now I quit.

No Ubuntu for me today!