No tilde is an island

I think maybe I'm missing out on a little ~ stuff because I don't spend much time in the shell there, but rather do most stuff (including typing this) in the shell on my local machine.^* But I've been following along on Twitter, and it's been interesting to see the ~.* network growing: tilde.club begat tilde.town, tilde.camp, tilde.farm, and a few other places that stray from the naming convention. When I get done poking at the scripts to produce this blog (or at least done-for-now), I'll have to look into getting phoenyx.net into that, because you guys, *Usenet*.

Won't happen before this weekend, though. It's neighborhood-cleanup weekend (and I'm the empress), and also somehow I got roped into providing chili for an event that got rescheduled to the same day. And that went from being "chili for 100" to "chili for 300." And also this is the year that everybody and his brother wants to volunteer for the cleanup - thirty people from the university in the neighborhood, another twenty from a high school whose usual neighborhood isn't having a cleanup. So the cleanup luncheon is also going from "chili for 50" to "chili for at least 100." You guys. I'm feeding 400 people this weekend. HOW DID THAT EVEN.

Chili for 100

Brown 10 pounds ground beef, drain. Add 5 #10 cans chili beans, 1 #10 can ketchup, 1 #10 can tomato juice. Simmer until heated through (or longer). Fills 2 ~18-quart roasters.

Sam's Club (I know, I know, but we don't have a Costco here yet) carries a 10-pound chub of ground beef, Bush's chili beans, Hunt's ketchup, and while it doesn't have canned tomato juice it *usually* carries a couple of yoked-together jugs that are more or less the right amount. And the juice is optional anyway, it stretches the chili but also thins it. I've made it without when using the chili for hot dogs or Frito chili pies. Depending on the price of beef, everything came to around $60. All the "fixins" of course bring the total up, but if you're doing a community event (like the cleanup) it's pretty easy to get everyone to bring a bottle of hot sauce, a few onions, a bag of pre-shredded cheese, etc. So it's a good way to feed a bunch of people. If you've got vegans among you, just mix up all the canned stuff separately and reserve some of it for the vegans… do up some TVP and mushrooms to mix in, or maybe let people bring their own meat-substitute if you're going the communal route.

* Since AT&T helpfully "upgraded" us from ADSL to… uh… ADSL that they call "UVerse" (whatever *that* distinction means), we haven't had a connection that can reliably stay connected for hours at a time. There's an upstream box that fails regularly (some days it can't see any IPv4 addresses at al). We've given them the IP address, called them out on it repeatedly on Twitter, and the answer is always, *always*, "Well, your modem is scheduled for a firmware upgrade in the next couple days, let us know if that doesn't fix it." We've gotten the tree cut down that was blocking Cox's ability to run a cable back to the house, so pretty soon we're going to take care of the problem ourselves. Trading it, no doubt, for a whole new set of problems.