Month: February 2004

A Better Shoelace Knot?

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

Reading over the ensuing comments on a shoe-fastening poll on Slashdot, the discussion turned to knot-tying techniques. Quitcherbitchen put it this way:

When you tie your laces, just do one extra loop around and then pull the second loop through. In other words, “the rabbit goes around the tree twice, then through the hole.”

Your laces will stayed tied all day, even throughout a run, but still come undone with a simple pull. Try it. […]

He then chimed in with an URL for an illustrated example where they call it The Better Bow. I read over it and tried to make sense of it in my head, but I’m not always so good at virualizations such as this.

I even tried untying one of my shoes and following along that way, but I got lost at the “Wrap the loop around your finger” bit. If you figure this out, please fill me in — perhaps demonstrating it to me on a shoe sometime IRL would clear things up.

Atkins Makes Its Own Food Pyramid

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

The Atkins folks have long spoken against the USDA Food Pyramid — I’m not a particular fan of it either and, indeed, the government plans on revising it by early next year. However, the Atkins group decided not to wait that long and they released their own food pyramid.

As you might expect, this pyramid has protein sources on the bottom tier (“eat more”) and grains at the top tier (“eat fewer”) — almost the opposite of the USDA version. Interestingly, even though a geometric food summary such as this may seem to oversimplify an eating plan, this one actually clarifies many aspects.

For one thing, many people think of Atkins as all “meat and cheese”. But, a quick look over their pyramid would show that’s not really the case — cheese is on the second-to-the-top tier, only just below grains. Many people also overlook the diet’s vegetable component. Veggies such as broccoli, cauliflower and asparagus (all of which are considered healthy on just about any diet) are on the second tier, just after protein sources.

I was also impressed that one of their footnotes emphasizes that hydrogenated oils should be avoided. Otherwise known as trans fats, they’re a rather bad type of fat as they not only raise your bad cholesterol but also lower your good cholesterol (even saturated fat doesn’t effect good cholesterol).

I don’t follow Atkins; rather, I go with The Zone which has a 40/30/30 ratio between carbs, protein & fats. All the same, Atkins seems a little more reasonable each time I learn more about it.

A Fish Called Wanda

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

John Cleese has been one of my favorite actors for some time now. He’s probably most famous for Monty Python and that’s where I first saw him. All the same, I think I most enjoyed him in Fawlty Towers (a sitcom from the mid 70s).

As I was perusing IMDB one day, I ran into A Fish Called Wanda. As it turns out, not only did John Cleese star in the film but he also wrote and directed it as well. I couldn’t lose! So, I had Mike add it to our Netflix queue and it arrived shortly thereafter.

I ended up watching the film last night. “Wanda” was made in 1988 and I thought of that as a good signn — ’88 seemed like a good year for Cleese. But, the film just wasn’t as funny as I had hoped. Sure, I had read the front-page comments (“Excellent caper comedy with a perfect cast”) but I should have read the “other user comments as well”.

I’m sure that most people find the film really good, but I just didn’t somehow. And, I found myself sharing many of the sentiments from the second-page reviews:

  • “Kevin Kline is almost unbearably irritating, and his character makes no sense (is he really a CIA killer, and if so, would he really be such a dumbo?); Jamie Lee Curtis simply isn’t as sexy or seductive as the film-makers want us to think she is, Michael Palin is wasted in a throwaway one-joke role and Cleese never gets much of a chance to do anything beyond looking bashful and doing his stock-in-trade ‘testy posh bloke’ schtick. […] ”

  • “Also Kevin Kline is too good as sadistic maniac Otto. If this was a Monty Python movie, Otto would be such an outragiously exaggerated character, that it would be at least a little bit funny. But Kline acts so naturally that you just hate the guy throughout the movie. […] ”

Those reviews pinpoint how I feel — Kline’s character was too mean to be funny, Palin’s stuttering isn’t even funny the first time, and Cleese’s character is more bumbling than humorous. Then again, maybe it’s just me. All the same, I don’t feel too bad for giving it a chance — with Netflix, it costs the same no matter how many movies we rent each month.

Andy Budd on CSS Margin Collapsing

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

Margin-collapsing can sometimes be tricky to CSS beginners; especially as modern browsers support CSS better, collapsing margins is something that you could easily run into. However, Andy Budd has written an extended blog entry on the workings behind collapsing margins.

For the most part, margin collapsing has few rules:

At its core, margin collapsing is very easy to understand. Basically when two vertical margins meet up, instead of adding together, the largest margin takes precedent and the other one “collapses” to nothing. […]

For example, if you have two adjacent paragraphs, the first with a 20px bottom margin and the second with a 15px top margin, the space between them will only be 20px — since the smaller of the two margins (15px) collapses into the larger one (20px).

It can get a bit tricky when borders come into play. In the case of borders, the two elements’ margins are no longer directly touching and so the margins don’t collapse. I’ve run into that one a few times when I’ve turned on borders on an element (for debugging) and then found the layout to be wildly different after I finished debugging and turned off the borders.

The article also goes on to talk about how margins collapse around floated elements. But, most beginners who would run into collapsing margins may not be using floats as a layout technique anyhow. In all, I found the article informative and I won’t hesitate to refer to it if I run into some weird collapsing issues.

Dijon, You’re All Right With Me

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

Back when I learned of Good Eats’ grilled cheese recipe, I wasn’t terribly enthused about the Dijon mustard called for in the recipe. Really, I haven’t liked Dijon mustard for some time. But, after thinking it over, I realized that maybe it was just me — maybe it was just the particular Dijon that I had been exposed to over the years.

Growing up, my parents enjoyed Grey Poupon with various dishes. And, I tried it several times over the years but didn’t quite like it. But, after seeing Dijon mustard used by so many television chefs, I got to thinking that maybe I should give Dijon another chance. And, I also came to realize that Grey Poupon isn’t the “gourmet French mustard” that it pretended to be — it’s made by Kraft!

So, the next time the grilled cheese episode of Good Eats aired, I paid special attention to the mustard that Alton used (I trust his views on food, after all). I didn’t get that good a look, but I noticed its black label and made a mental note of the jar’s approximate size.

Next time I visited Target, I strolled down their mustard aisle to see what I could find. Sure enough, I found a couple likely candidates from Maille. Their labels are black and their jars looked about right size. There were two varieties: original Dijon and wholegrain. Figuring that the wholegrain version might have more Dijon essence, I decided to go for that one. And, besides, at $2.50, it wasn’t a big investment in case it turned out that I didn’t like it.

That evening, I prepared my tuna sandwiches for the following day (typically, I would have a tuna sandwich for breakfast and lunch, though I’ve been having omelettes for breakfast recently). And, I decided to give the new Maille Wholegrain Dijon a try. So, I slathered on a layer to each of the sandwiches. I prepared the tuna and completed the sandwiches.

Though I made the Dijon-tuna sandwiches last night, I only had a chance to try one today. And, to my pleasant surprise, it was rather tasty. There wasn’t any of that weird Grey Poupon-esque aftertaste and the Maille Dijon was also more flavorful (yet somehow more subtle) than the brown mustards I was used to. As an unexpected bonus, the wholegrain nature of the mustard also created little “flavor pockets” of mustard that burst in each bite.

I’m guessing that Grey Poupon may still not be my cup of tea, but I’m satisfied with my $2.50 investment into Maille. Perhaps I’ll even try the original Dijon next time, just to see how its flavor profile compares to the wholegrain.