Question: What’s the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?
Answer: George W. Bush had a plan to get out of the Vietnam War.
For a couple of days I’ve been trying out the Acqua theme for my linux-based KDE desktop. It makes everything look like a Mac, even if it’s just a costume.
I wish they’d make Darwin, the open source copy of Mac OS X, function on x86-based processors instead of just the PowerPC. Seems like that’s what I want to play with next. Ideal: Mac OS X with full linux binary compatibility running on the new paper-thin Sony Vaio X505 laptop.
Patrick and I were reading stories out of a book of “children’s verse” today. Turning the page, I see a story titled Tender Heartedness. Sounds harmless enough for a 3 year-old. It is a book of stories for children, right?
You tell me the age of the kid who should hear this gem. 🙂
Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes;
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven’t the heart to poke poor Billy.
When I’ve got a work contract, I’m upstairs in the office (rear bedroom) hacking away and like to listen to either music or podcasts of different kinds including Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, the Rock and Roll Geek Show, Air America Radio shows, Reel Reviews, iPodio news, RasterWeb! Audio (silly jokes), and lots more. A visit to audio.weblogs.com shows you the last 100 podcasts to be put on the Net, which you can also have feed right into your player to let you listen to a wide variety of things.
While this started to give yet another cool way to use your iPod, if you don’t actually own one you can still listen to the mp3s for it on your PC, or on your own mp3 player of another company. (Though you’re probably still reconsidering your choice and looking at the iPods of others with a bit of envy, right?) The iPodder client is available for MacOS and Windows, with a Linux version being worked on as we speak. Right now I use the bashipodder scripting hack, though it’s got one bug: sometimes a revised mp3 on a server can trick it into downloading it again. (Update: a tweak to cache the RSS file for comparison based on modification date reduces the need to repeatedly download the full file, and a look for the local file using the basename of the URL to get the name of the mp3 avoids multiple downloads.)
Anyway, I was working away with my headphones on listening to the awesome Rock and Roll Geek Show. Elana came into the office and started cracking up. She said, “Don’t you hear that?” I took off the headphones because I didn’t know what she was talking about.
Only to hear the podcast coming out of the speakers on my desk. I’d not actually turned them all the way down. Duh!
(What’s a podcast? It just started in August 2004; a small blog post offers some history behind it.)
The other night I got to visit a wine bar in Dublin with our friend Dolores, where we were joined by a couple of her workmates. I’d been really busy with work lately and had to go up into town that afternoon to a meeting. Dolores had stopped by our house for a cup of tea, and my wife Elana was a sweetheart and encouraged us to go to the wine bar after my meeting. E had been there before with her and really enjoyed it.
When Elana and I visited Florence a few years ago, we saw a traditional wine bar complete with Italian art, food, wine, and most importantly, character. This wine bar in Ireland sure looks the part. It’s called Enoteca Delle Langhe , and is set up in parts of two small buildings looking out on a wide open courtyard between them. The location is called Blooms Lane (ala Joyce in Ulysses) in the center of Dublin near Temple Bar and the new Millennium Bridge. During dry weather, you can sit outside at long wooden tables and enjoy overlapping conversations with new acquaintances, the stars shining down from the night sky. On one outer wall is a really large version of The Last Supper, but with faces replaced to be those of various people found from a walk through Dublin.
With the recast apostles gazing in on us, we enjoyed a red Italian wine that was a Montepulciano/Sangiovese blend, but I can’t for the life of me remember the vineyard. (And a few pages into a Google search for it, I have to admit defeat.) I remember the rather long words describing it because Dolores and I had just been talking about not having confidence in our pronounciation of “Montepulciano”. Our theory, which Elana later concurred: mawn-tay-pool-chee-ahh-no.
When the first bottle arrived, I asked the waitress for her opinion. (The theory being that this Italian wine bar has probably been asked the same thing by other newbie customers plenty of times.) She looked at me in confusion, and started to explain in broken English that it had to do with the kind of grape used in making the wine. Dolores and I both tried to more clearly ask the question, pointing at the word on the bottle’s label, but it only got the waitress more flustered. Then she announced to us, “Um, I don’t know any Italian.” Oh.
She went to another customer, and we sipped and chatted about editing the Innocent Joy story to try to submit to a magazine. The wine was inexpensive and absolutely delicious. The inside walls across from the large windows were covered top-to-bottom with wooden cubby-holes holding a wide variety of wines, undoubtedly all bottles for sale. When we first arrived, the various wooden tables were mostly empty. Within the next hour, every table was full, as was the bar across from us.
Dolores got a call on her mobile (cell phone), and told me that her friend from work was on her way to join us. We poured some wine into a third glass and set it down on the table in the spot next to me so we could secure her seat (one of four square wooden stools around our wooden table). Our attempt to create the image of a third person at our table who’d just stepped away for a moment didn’t seem to combat rudeness: a few minutes later a guy showed up to join the table behind us and pulled over the stool. He was of much bigger build than me, and neither Dolores nor I felt like raising a fuss. Luckily the other free seat at our table was protected by her coat, so when her friend arrived Dolores could give her a stool to sit on. A bit later, another coworker (a guy) appeared and joined us.
A fresh bottle of wine was opened, and we made two orders of munchies. The first was a meat and cheese plate carrying some amazing salami, sausage, parma ham, all sorts of goodies. We also had this neat crostini (little toasted bread) plate where each of nine toasted pieces of crostini had a different topping. A pesto, some cheese, an olive pate, you name it. The creativity used in its creation was impressive. And the food was SO good!
The crowd around the bar started to sing “Happy Birthday” and quickly everyone else joined in. Dolores said it was the owner’s birthday today. The target of the singing became more obvious as he ran his hands through his wild Billy Connolly grey hair. When the song ended, he made some wisecrack that earned some applause and plenty of laughter, then the room returned to its normal murmur.
Dolores’s female friend was explaining the rampant corruption of the Garda (police) in Ireland; her passion about the topic grew as the wine disappeared from her glass. Suddenly there was a strange resounding thud behind me. The lady on the stool behind me had fallen off her stool, to her embarrassment and the attention of everyone else in the wine bar. I offered my hand to help her, but she took this as a suggestion that she wasn’t “in full control of her faculties,” shall we say, and pulled herself back up on her own. She continued to apologize profusely with a silly grin on her face. Interestingly, her stool-thief friend had already slipped out before this happened.
Dolores picked up her mobile as it began to ring again, then passed it over to me. E was calling, asking why my phone was turned off and was I okay? I’d absentmindedly put my mobile into my jacket on the floor, and never heard its cries as E first sent me a text message then called 3 times. How can you effectively convey sheepish embarrassment over the phone? Hopefully enough apologies along with gratitude at having had the opportunity to go out saved me from any trouble. (I’ve heard “in the doghouse” three or four times on the radio or TV in the last couple of days, which is a really silly phrase. But nothing bugs me more than hearing people who should definitely know better use poor grammar. Too many shows have characters saying “she did a real good job,” not to mention reporters. Thank god for copy editors.) After I-love-yous I hung up and went back inside, passing people smoking their cigarettes outside in the cold. I quit about 7 years ago after smoking for nearly 15 years, and was relieved when I didn’t find myself tempted to bum one from them (wine or beer can seriously reduce the ability to resist the urge).
We’d only intended to stay there for a little while, but when it was finally time for us to go home (the majority of the four of us were now yawning regularly) approximately six hours had passed. But lots of good conversation, great wine and food, and an amazing atmosphere sure made the time speed by. Can’t wait to go there with Elana.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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