Monday, September 27, 2010

New Socks!!

I got a new pair of socks!

The marvelous AG sent me to get yarn a few months ago and I got some Noro Kureyon (S148). As a result she handed me these this afternoon.

They're quite weird: they're thin and quite tight to begin with, but stretched out nicely. They're definitely very comfortable and nice and warm.

However, I would offer this health warning: the coefficient of friction between this yarn, when knitted-up, and a surface like a linoleum floor is as near to zero as makes no odds.

(Layman's Translation: wearing just these into the kitchen without caution may result in you being very quickly a**e over t**s !!)

Oh yes - and I do like the colours, despite what the AG was worrying about in advance. They'll be on show on Tuesday!

[Food]
So happy at getting new socks this evening, I tried my hand at a form of saganiki (fried appetiser) called tiganiti (fried cheese; usually feta). The Wikipedia page has a good picture of a square piece - I did mine in slices, but they looked the same. It was a little saltier than I'd recalled, but ace all the same. No pictures, I'm afraid - I was hungry!
TTFN

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Autumn is Finally Here

That's right! The Philadelphia area's finally getting into the 80s (F) with some reliability - yesterday was 89 and today almost got to 80. Maybe the cooling will have some effect on the area's drivers, who have been demonstrating wild and reckless stupidity (at least, on the roads that I travel) for the last six to eight months. I doubt it though: given the economy, there has to be at least one occupation that's looking for more workers - the auto-repair business! Honestly, though, I get the impression that about 50% of the drivers here only have intact cars because they've sold their souls to the devil in exchange for a crash-free life!

[Food]
We'll be having guests soon and one of them is a vegetarian, so that takes a little thought - she's not vegan, but I don't think that it's fair to offer a dish made with vegetables fried in meat fat, for example! So, one possibility is going to be cheese tortellini in tomato sauce ... and who knows what goes into the tomato sauces you get at the store. Hence you'd have found me yesterday afternoon slaving over a huge pot of bubbling redness.

It turned out really easy to make: just get two 3 lb boxes of tomatoes from BJs, chop them up, and dump them into a really large cooking casserole - I used one from IKEA that's oven-proof as well as for the stove-top, and non-stick into the bargain. It holds about 5 litres, and ended up about 80% full!

In with the tomatoes goes about quarter of a litre of water and half that of olive oil. Three heaped teaspoons of chopped garlic from a jar of the stuff in oil (BJs again!), and two very heaped teaspoons of chopped dry Basil (sorry mum - I just didn't have any fresh!). If it's destined for kids, a little sugar (a soup spoon or two) will make a lot of difference to the sweetness (so don't go overboard, or you'll be having it with ice cream!)

All this just about fits into the casserole, so fine! Turn on the heat, pop on the lid, and get it to the boil. Once it's there, lower the heat pretty much as low as it will go and let it simmer for about 45 minutes. After that, take your trusty stick blender and totally obliterate any lumps of any sort. Then you can let it cool off, put it into food savers, and keep it in the fridge - up to a week is safe. For longer than that it should freeze fine.

Oh! You don't have a stick blender? Well, aside from making off with granny's, you can part with about $25-$30 for on in most shops, although they do come more expensive. I don't see why, as all they are is a miniaturised outboard motor, but what do I know? In fact, if you're really in need, and really want to make sure that you never ever, ever have to buy another on (and probably your great great grand-children won't, either!), you can go to MyChefStore and splurge on a RoboCoupe MP450 Turbo model. They tag it with a "Lowest Price Guarantee", but I can't see anyone willing to shell out $572.42 as being unduly worried about another dollar or three! It boasts 3/4 of a kilowatt of power and a maximum speed of 12,000 rpm, so I'd keep it securely under lock and key if your other half is doing anything like mixing concrete (not that the concrete would have an ice-cube's chance in hell against this beast!) By the way, I would have added a picture, but Chrome 5.0.375.127 (55887) for Ubuntu 10.04 doesn't seem to get on too well with BlogSpot, for uploading images.

[Tech]
Pet peeve of the week. Companies that think that they're really "with it", but don't test their stuff properly before pushing it out, and don't offer enough support when the inevitable happens. I'll not name names, but a company should, in my opinion, use a technology like Flash on a site where its new recruits are required to log in and fill in information about themselves, etc. Adobe aficionados will immediately rise up and threaten to stone me but it remains a fact that, so far, the maker of the most popular hand-held sate-form computing device, the iPad, still does not support Flash. Many many young people use iPads as their primary computing devices - and why not? Anyhow, I recently saw a site, obligatory for new recruits, when Flash was used throughout. One or two of the links to other pages worked fine, but ..... most didn't come up as links at all, and the page as a whole was very slow to load. On a 2 GHz machine with plenty of memory and a good high-speed connection it took over four minutes to load when the user tried - as suggested by the support people - to use MS IE!

Guys! Testing is everything! You can have the most wonderful product out there, but if people can't get it to work then it isn't just useless - it's actively promoting your bad name!
TTFN

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Fruit Destinies

Just a few thoughts that came from a friend about a year ago. I saw a "Like" on Facebook for part of this, that reminded me...

This should probably be taped to your bathroom mirror where one could read it every day.
You may not realize it, but it's 100% true.
1. There are at least two people in this world that you would die for.
2. At least 15 people in this world love you in some way.
3. The only reason anyone would ever hate you is because they want to be just like you.
4. A smile from you can bring happiness to anyone, even if they don't like you.
5. Every night, SOMEONE thinks about you before they go to sleep.
6. You mean the world to someone.
7. You are special and unique.
8. Someone that you don't even know exists loves you.
9. When you make the biggest mistake ever, something good comes from it.
10. When you think the world has turned its back on you take another look.
11. Always remember the compliments you received. Forget about the rude remarks.
Always remember..... when life hands you Lemons, ask for Tequila and Salt and call me over!
I would rather have one rose and a kind word from a friend while I'm here than a whole truck load when I'm gone.

Which was rather nice.

For all you programmers out there, take a look here. It isn't always what you might want to hear, but very possibly the best thing that you do hear at times.
TTFN

Monday, September 13, 2010

Meeting Old Friends

Meeting a friend that you haven't seen in a long time is a great experience - it lets you catch up on lots of things that you never finished talking about. The AG and I went into NYC last weekend to meet her brother who has just finished a year studying at Durham University in England. He used to live in NYC before departing for England, so it was a kind of homecoming for him too, seeing places he had missed for a year before heading off to family in ID.

[Sharp Pointy Sticks Part]
At the behest of the AG we went to a LYS called Purl, on Broome Street in SoHo. That's their picture of the shop-front, and here below are some more of the interior.





































The rest from Purl are here on PhotoBucket.

Thursday, September 02, 2010

Doubting Your Own Life

If the fabric of your life as you live and like it depended on some particular thing, would you attack that thing? Would you adulterate it and dilute it ? You might, if you wanted to replace it with something better or longer-lasting, but surely not out of ignorance or spite.

We see our advanced world dependent on oil for much of its energy supply. So much so, in fact, that if the demand for oil stays exactly as it is today then we'll have to discover new reserves equivalent to four times that of Saudi Arabia to keep us driving for the rest of the century - maybe less. That's a very large target, so finding replacement sources is a good idea. In fact, it's an absolute necessity!

As an engineer by education, I have to say that with situations like this there's a requirement to look at every single possibility, and, maybe, use them all. Even if we were to manage to make pocket-sized fusion reactors in, say, 20 years' time, we'd still have a need for oil - if for nothing else then for lubrication! Eventually we won't be using oil as a portable energy source, but some other substance will have to make do. Petrol is just too darned convenient - easily transported and dispensed and with a lot of stored energy per unit volume.

Task for all of us: support all the people trying to replace oil-based fuels.

TTFN


Found Food

I have published quite a few recipes here on my blog over the last few years, and I hope that all my readers have tried at least some of the...