zen.org Communal Weblog

Today’s adventure: make dinner.

Sounds easy. Wasn’t. Cause as I sit in my comfy couch this afternoon, I see happy Vera walking by. She pops in, says, “I’m going to the doctor to see if I need stitches.” She *sliced* her thumb on a ham tin. I mean sliced (dude, if you’re squeamish, please don’t look. I warned you). Like, I’m never using a key to open any of those silly kinds of cans ever. She didn’t believe that she needed company, but I convinced her otherwise. Thank god, too, cause we were there for like 2 hours waiting. Then they finally saw her, had her put her finger under the taps, and then *glued* it shut. GLUED. /shakes head. I had that in the back room….we coulda avoided the 2 hour wait!

So after she let me to go Tesco to get the few things I needed for dinner. Basically leeks, since it’s chicken and sweet leek pie. Now, this is a Jamie Oliver recipe, and it’s one we’ve done before (tho no comments written in the book, so that should worry me…), but it takes forever. First you have to skin and debone the chicken legs (thank you for teaching me technique, Alton Brown), then cut up the leeks, carrots and prep the thyme. (Does anyone else get thyme all over the place when they strip the leaves? I got some in my hair.) Then cook for 15 minutes, add wine (we used apple juice instead, as I had no vino), water and soymilk, and boom. Stir, and bubble for 45 minutes. Then put in pie dish and then top with puff pastry.

Sounds easy. Can take a while. Was it good? Ummmmmmmmm….yeah. Filling. Hopefully the puff pastry will last til lunch tomorrow. We’re having a massive leftover lunch, since almost every plastic container (and that’s saying a lot) is being used right now.

P decided that he wanted to make something from the leftover puff pastry. So we did. All together now…awwwwwwwwwww.

[tags]altonbrown, cooking, jamieoliver, vera, p[/tags]

Flippin’ Classic. Curse words, so it’s nsfw, depending on where you are.

PATRIOTIC POSTERS@WHITEHOUSE.ORG

According to the latest EFF: DeepLinks, it’s time to claim your money/replacement/downloads from SonyBMG for the lovely XCP/MediaMax debacle. This is mainly for US people, since I don’t think they’re replacing for non-US CDs (hello…DRI?).

Regardless, spread the word. Sony needs to know they screwed up, and that consumers feel really upset about this.

[tags] eff, sonybmg, xcp, mediamax[/tags]

Irishblogawards are in the top tags on Flickr right now. Does it help it’s a sleepy Sunday? Sure…but Rymus’ photos are sooooo good. All of them are, actually. ‘Cept the ones from my cameraphone. Can’t wait til O’Shea’s are up.

That was a hell of a night. Twenty cleaned up completely, that’s for sure. But he missed out, since he didn’t show, cause his emissary shall be keeping the iPod Nano that Twenny was given for winning Best Blog.

Rick O’Shea did well as the MC, and Damien is to be fully commended for getting the things up and running. I’m guessing that about 150 people showed up.

The greatest part was seeing all these people whose blogs I read in one room. Raftery, RedMum (have fun with that router!), Sarah Carey, Bernard, Justin Mason (looking oh-so-California), Antoin, Piaras (getting crap for that post), and so so so many more. One of the best things was that one group who sponsored one of the awards later WON one!

Rick and I have determined we were separated at birth. And a very kind soul poured me into a cab home, thankfully. I blame the Cosmopolitan. My dear hubby is now patting my brow and getting me to drink lots of water.

I’m going to upload any photos from the cameraphone to Flickr, tagged with irishblogawards. Enjoy!

[tags] irishblogawards, irishblogs, ireland, awards, irish blog awards [/tags]

http://rawstory.com/news/2006/Retired_Supreme_Court_Justice_hits_attacks_0310.html

O’Connor observed that there have been a lot of suggestions lately for so-called judicial reforms, recommendations for the massive impeachment of judges, stripping the courts of jurisdiction and cutting judicial budgets to punish offending judges.

On a recent episode of the tv programme “Family Feud” [the US version of “Family Fortune”], 100 people were asked to name a famous person to whom they’d like to give a lie-detector test … out of those 100 Americans, 47 responded “Pres. Bush.”

earthsite.org, the “Official Site of International Earth Day” places it on March 20, 2006. On the “Spring/Vernal Equinox” the <title/> says. Which sort of snubs half the Earth. They also insist that EARTH DAY IS NOT APRIL 22. Then earthday.net says it’s on April 22.

What day should Zoë and I take off our clothing and run naked in the park?

I did an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade -u on our MythTV box to update it to the latest and greatest. After doing the upgrade, though, we were no longer able to watch live TV. I read through the release notes and found the LiveTV part had changed drastically. (Hmm, is it about here you’re wondering why I upgraded everything before reading what was changing?)

The LiveTV change makes it possible to watch something for a while, hit record, and have it save everything you’ve seen so far.

The fix to let us again watch live TV through our MythTV box was to run mythtvsetup and look under Capture cards and modify the single /dev/video0 entry that’s in there to have a Default Input value of S-Video 0.

When I first set up the box, I’d set up two inputs, one from the “regular” cable (Tuner 0) and one from the NTL Digital Cable box (S-Video 0). The intent was to make the MythTV record shows off the regular cable so we could watch whatever we wanted from the digital cable (no channels changing out from under us). I found the quality of what was being recorded for regular cable wasn’t the greatest, so I finally ditched the idea and stuck to just recording programs off digital cable. (Hmm, perhaps I should give Tuner 0 a try with the new version?) I deleted the Tuner 0 input connection, leaving just S-Video 0.

So it appears the new way of capturing live TV in a style that can be retroactively recorded has closed the part of MythTV that would iterate through input connections if the default doesn’t work. Instead, it will throw you right back at the initial screen for the UI. (Actually, this change is more of a workaround; still need to look at the diffs and figure out the real fix to the code to make it stop throwing us back out.)

Having changed it from the old Tuner 0 to S-Video 0, I restarted mythtvbackend, then mythtvfrontend. Voila, we can again watch live TV and pause it when the phone rings or someone comes to the door. Or to avoid commercials by pausing til we know they’re done (commercials are considerably less frequent in Ireland/UK television than in the US, but they’re still there). Thanks, MythTV!

Just read this in a newsletter that I get. I can’t be the only one who sees this, can I?

Parents Against Junk Food (our effort to improve school lunches around
the country) is being launched April 1. The Web site address will be
www.parentsagainstjunkfood.org . The site will offer a variety of ways
for you to get involved (including contacting your representatives in
Congress), and we will be asking you to send us letters, photos, and
information on the lunches in your local schools. Please help!

Down in the test kitchen, the editors of our sister publication,
Cook’s Country, just came up with a great recipe for oven-fried onion
rings using ground potato chips for a coating and the heat of the oven
(no frying required) to do the cooking. Click here for the recipe.

[tags]cooking, cooksillustrated, junkfood, lunch, irishblogs[/tags]