zen.org Communal Weblog

So I’m still trying to figure out how this blog is different from the LiveJournal blog. I guess it’s just the overall difference of not having the little community. But it’s good, cause I gotta learn to do things on my own, right? RIGHT?! 🙂

B and I are listening to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, which is his podcast. I love podcasts, they’re great. I don’t seem to have time to listen to the ones that I’m really into tho. But Adam’s is fun.

Adam just said something about plastic knives and forks on the airplane. It is stupid, considering that a lot of the time the first class does crystal glasses. Which would be a bit more dangerous than a metal FORK.

When citing something in the ISO C++ Standard, or many other such standards, there’s a common notation shared for email or quick notes. Sometimes it looks like “$5.4/2”, “5.4p2”, and others use “$5.4(2)” or even “5.4.2.1.3”. Anyway, a reference like “$5.4.1” often means “Clause 5, Section 4, Paragraph 1”. Or even “Section 5.4, paragraph 1”.

Clause 5 happens to be titled “Expressions”. While looking for something else, I came across a great post someone made trying to explain this odd notation:

> What does 5.7p6 mean?
Section 5.7, paragraph 6.
Alternatively, The Book of Expressions, chapter 7, verse 6.
...
> {It's the C++ Standard, which for C++ programmers is pretty close to the
>  'Bible' -mod/fwg}

Heh.

I was surfing for local farms stuff, and encountered two interesting sites, first the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Jersey. I was surprised by several local organic farms and restaurants. I hope to visit some of them in the spring.

Linked from that page, was The Meatrix, a play on The Matrix movie but about the source of meat in these United States. It is very cute. I’ve been making meat buying decisions based on what they are trying to say for years.

Tonight we had a meal that has been a useful fall-back for us if we don’t manage to plan ahead (or, in this case, put off doing recipes and realized we’d done everything we picked in advance). We made lemon chicken with a tasty rice pilaf and a random vegetable choice (this time, spinach).

Normally, we’ve got about a week’s worth of recipes figured out, selecting specific dishes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Food allergies have made throwing together dishes a little more difficult, so if we work out the week’s recipes in advance we alleviate some of the stress that would manifest itself when we’re picking what to eat. It also puts all of the shopping into one trip, so we’ve managed to ease both demand for supplies (one big shopping trip with a carefully-composed shopping list) and what do to each time we have to cook (look at the menu list for the week). Another handy side-effect is that we can go back a few months and pick dishes we’ve not made in a while to speed up the process of putting together the week’s menus—then we can flesh out the remaining spots with new ideas. At least one dish a day is something we’ve done before.

Alton Brown, host of Good Eats on the Food Network, has done a bunch of cool books which tend to include great recipes. We’ve made a wide variety of his recipes (another side-effect of food allergies: you cook just about every single meal, and don’t eat out much), and like just about all of them. This time, it was his rice pilaf that’s incredibly easy. I’m including a link to his book at the bottom of this post because no-one has risked trying copyright attribution to post his recipe publicly. (Nope, I’m not going to try either, at least in any detail.) Anyway, it’s a simple process of melting some butter, toss in diced onions and garlic, then rice for a few minutes, then a whole bunch of water (or stock, or in this case we did 2/3 veggie stock and 1/3 white wine), and cover it and stick it in the oven for about 20 minutes. Out it comes, sits for a minute uncovered, then gets fluffed up. The end result is an awesome rice pilaf that goes with a wide variety of recipes.

My choice was a Lemon Chicken recipe that appears in the first of Susan Branch’s great set of cookbooks. It’s some flour-dressed pounded chicken breasts put into oil & butter for only a few minutes; having bashed it into a thinner piece of chicken, it accelerates the cooking time. Once the chicken’s done, you take it out and make a nice sauce with some more butter, some fresh chopped parsley, and a bit of lemon juice.

It’s all effortless, and dee-lish. Our son Patrick has consistently liked it, particularly the rice. We find the rice pilaf absolutely addictive. It goes well both with white wine and, of course, a wee pint of Guinness. 🙂

Sources: I’m Just Here for the Food by Alton Brown, and Heart of the Home by Susan Branch.

It only takes a glance at an annotated map of Ireland to see just how DSL really doesn’t exist for most of Ireland.

Bucks County has a pretty good On-Line Election Results web site. If you visit the Municipality of Yardley Borough page for today’s general election, and go look at the number of votes for David Cobb, one. He he.

Zoë, 余艾蕾, and I waited in line just under an hour to vote today. Zoë was awake most of the time, but by the time we got to the booth she was sleeping. Both the Democratic and Republican poll observers came over and ogled at the baby. MoveOn PAC was the only organization with a table at the Yardly-Makefield fire station in Yardley Borough.

While there was four voting booths set up, everybody had to go through a bottle neck of one person to vote. Most of the time only one or two booths where in use. It seemed a bit silly. All went smoothly.

Now it’s your turn, go vote!

Haven’t been able to work on the TV pvr-box much for the last couple of weeks. Hopefully this coming weekend I’ll be able to attack it with furvor. I want to fix sound, and get all of the channels going. A friend sent me their MythTV channels list, in the great form of SQL commands. That means I’ll just have to do a bit of editing, and I can recreate the appropriate databasese in MySQL to let it have everything it should need.

My friend Declan and I messed with it a bit last week and I was able to make a single channel show up properly. Well, that’s not exactly right. The picture is skipping frames a lot. I got an AMD Sempron 2600+ 1.833 GHz CPU for this, which I thought would be plenty for what it’ll be doing. But I’m suddenly suspicious that in my efforts to be frugal, I undercut the ability to make the box work properly.

The rest of the hardware in this is:

• Shuttle SN45GV2 Barebone PC box (I love this thing now and want more of them 🙂 )
• 512Mb of Corsair Value S. PC3200 DDR-DIMM memory
• nVidia-based GeForce2 GTS video card with 64Mb of video RAM
• Maxtor 250GB Internal Hard Drive, 7200 RPM
• Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 Personal Video Recorder PCI card
• external Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge, version2 (whatever that means)
• random CD-ROM I had lying around in our attic (you don’t want to know the volume of junk up in that attic…

Cross your fingers that nothing will eat up the time on Saturday or Sunday.

The carvery lunch offered in many Irish pubs is a real treat for residents and tourists alike. The choices start at roast beef and continue on to include lasagne, roast lamb, fried cod, paninis & sandwiches, you name it. A simple order of the roast beef is met with the question, “All potato and veg with that?” The meat’s already magically appearing as if you’ve transported yourself to the main hall at Hogwarts, and behind you will be Harry Potter and Hermione waiting to get their chance to order.

A simple “Yes” to the question makes an unbelievable amount of food accumulate. Aside from enough meat for three people, mounds of vegetables appear: vast portions of mashed potato, roasted potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and roasted onions.

He looks up expectantly and asks, “Gravy?” How could he possibly add . . .

Nevermind. It fit, all four huge spoonfuls of it. By the time the serving is complete, you can’t see the surface of your large plate. The food rises up as if on top of a mound of soil for a freshly-dug basement.

Twenty minutes later, anyone walking by your table would see an empty plate but an obviously full tummy sitting across from it. Shaking their head as they make their way to the bar, they can only marvel at the capacity of the human appetite.

Couple your meal with a pint of Guinness and you’re ready for whatever the day may give you.

If you are a registered voter in the United States, make sure you vote tomorrow. I know who I’m going to vote for. I don’t care who you vote for, just vote!