Thanksgiving Pictures 2003

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

Yeah, I realize that it’s well past Christmas, but my Thanksgiving pictures are now online — I posted 18 of the 23 pictures that I shot over those four days. And, if you create a Gallery account, you’ll be able to vote on images (Excellent, Good, Average, and so on). For whatever reason, the Register link appears on the Gallery main page but not on any of the subalbum pages.

I’ve had them processed and ready for several weeks, but my hosting provider had reconfigured a couple PHP options under my feet and broke my Gallery in the process; it took a few persistent e-mails to get them to change the options back, but it should be fine now. (I’ll post more about that later.)

In any case, we visited my brother in Menlo Park for Thanksgiving this year and we also went into San Franciso for some touristy bits on Friday (see also a QuickTime montage that my brother created). As usual, we cooked & smoked our turkey on the grill over several hours (mmm, smoked turkey!).

And, here’re a couple quick notes on the photos, just as with my photos from Greece:

  • You’ll see that each filename ends with “_smaller”. This is because I resized each image to 1024x768 before uploading it. I did this out of disk space concerns; for instance, the full-size Menlo Park pictures are 13.6 MB but 2.7 MB in their smaller form. Besides, it can be tough to get your head around a 2560x1920 image ;0.

  • Though I resized the images for upload purposes, I’ve kept the full-size versions of each image as well (which are all 5 MPixels). So if you want a full-size copy of any image, just let me know.

  • And, all images are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. In short, I give everyone the right to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. In return, you must give me credit if you use an image and commercial use is not allowed unless I separately give permission. But, be a chum and go to the link yourself — the page linked is a “Commons Deed” and has no legalese :).

And if anyone is savvy with customizing Gallery, I’d like to add the Creative Commons icon and some explanation text to each of my Gallery pages. I’m sure this is a fairly straightforward template change, but I’m not sure which files need to be modified.

Cottage Cheese Omelettes — Not So Nice

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

As I often do, I made myself an omelette this morning. And, for the past couple omelettes, I’ve been making use of some crumbled Amish blue cheese that I picked up at Sam's Club last week. Formerly, I would use shredded sharp cheddar cheese, but that always felt like a stop-gap solution to me. And the blue cheese just makes such such a more flavorful omelette.

So, the blue cheese has been going well. And I remembered reading about an another omelette addition as well: cottage cheese. Apparently, the cottage cheese could add protein along with a pleasant creaminess to the omelette. So, I thought I’d give it a try.

After beating the eggs and adding them to the skillet, I soon added a few spoonfuls of cottage cheese along with a sprinkling of blue cheese. Soon enough, the omelette set up and I folded it onto my plate. Those first few bites were actually rather nice. The cottage cheese — still cold from just having come from the fridge — provided a sensation a bit like an eggy baked-Alaska.

However, it soon went downhill from there. The cottage cheese, still cold, began to assert the laws of thermodynamics as it sucked the rest of the heat out of the omelette. So, after those first intriging bites, the omelette soon became soggy and chilly. The omelette went from “Hmm, this isn’t too bad” to “Yikes, this isn't so tasty anymore.&rdquo.

Perhaps if I prewarmed the cottage cheese or even added it to the omelette earlier in the cooking process, it would be able to warm to the temperature of the rest of the omelette and the resulting dish wouldn’t have the omelette-stuffed-with-ice-cubes effect. In any case, I’m not so sure I’ll try cottage cheese in an omelette again anytime soon.

Recipe: Milky Way Peanut Butter Cookies

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Among other gifts, Mike got some candy for Christmas, including some Fun Size Milky Way bars. In contrast to their peanut-filled cousins, Snickers, Milky Ways are relatively tame — mostly caramel and nougat. So, on a lark, I decided to check AllRecipes to see whether there were any Milky Way-based recipes. Sure enough, I found one: Milky Way Peanut Butter Cookies.

Since I had some free time yesterday, I decided to give it a shot. The recipe is fairly easy — just three steps — and the only thing to keep in mind is that the recipe needs bite-sized Milky Ways (a typo at one point mentions Fun Size, but the recipe’s reviews confirm that bite size is needed).

Milky Way Peanut Butter Cookies

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/2 cup peanut butter
  • 1 egg
  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 36 fun [bite] size bars Milky Way [If you have Fun Size bars instead, just cut them in half to create bite size.]

Directions:

  1. Cream together white sugar, brown sugar, butter or margarine, vanilla, peanut butter and the egg.
  2. Add in flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
  3. Wrap 1 heaping teaspoon of dough around a bite sized Milky Way candy bar. Bake 13-16 minutes at 350° F (175° C). Let cool 5 minutes before removing from pan.

So, I mixed up the cookie dough and decided on 14 minutes cooking time (well, the directions said 13-16 minutes and 14 sounded like a good mid-point). And even though my oven doesn’t heat that unevenly, I swapped the two cookie sheets halfway through just to be sure.

I took out the cookies after 14 minutes and — as directed by the recipe — I let them cool for 5 minutes. It’s not that they were all that hot, but they needed those few minutes to firm up. And, as soon as the 5-minute timer beeped, I grabbed one and gingerly took a bite.

To my delight, the nougat/caramel had become warm and molten — similar in some ways but even better than a Caramello bar. The cookies turned out even better than I expected and I’m tempted to cookieify some Fun Size Snickers bars later this week :).

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

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Lynne Truss has a new book out about punctuation — and it’s a #1 best seller in Britain. The initial printing was 15,000, but “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is now up to 510,000 in print. I enjoy language in any case, but the book looks appealing on its own:

There are many possible reasons for the tremendous success of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” a spritely volume that leads the reader through the valley of the shadow of comma splice; refers to the apostrophe as “our long-suffering little friend”; makes a rousing case for the semicolon's usefulness in, among other things, “calling a bunch of brawling commas to attention”; and describes Woodrow Wilson's inexplicable visceral hatred of the hyphen, which he called � spectacularly undermining his own argument — “the most un-American thing in the world.” […]

And, if you haven’t heard the joke about the panda going into a bar (from where the book got its title), it's explained at the end of the article ;).

(Due credit: Media Bistro’s Daily Media News newsletter)

Camino — Almost Had It

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

When computing, I like a consistent user interface. When on Windows, I want Windows-widgets and when on Mac I want Mac-widgets :). And, for the most part, I haven’t had problems of that nature. But, Mozilla Firebird on Mac OS has always bugged me a little bit. It’s a great browser, of course, but it has its own widget set. For example, select pulldowns (as you might find for a State on a form) have a pull-down arrow and scrollbars — just as you’d find on Windows.

So, at a New Years get-together last night, Ru whipped out his 12" PowerBook to show us one of his favorite Flash movies (Cow Bondage, FWIW) and I noticed that his browser had all the native Mac widgets! After a quick glance to the menubar, I noticed that he was running Camino. I had heard of Camino before — a browser with the Gecko rendering engine along with a Mac-tastic interface — but I had assumed that development dwindled once Firebird came about.

As it turns out, the Camino project is alive and well. So, I downloaded the latest Camino nightly and gave it a try just now. I loaded it up and it was like putting on an old pair of shoes that fit in all the right places. I had all my familiar widgets and I was ready to make the browser transition from Firebird. But, trouble soon began to seep in…

I first checked the Windows menu for the DOM Inspector but I couldn’t find it. Not that regular web surfers have much need for such a tool, but I find it an indespensible resource for web development. So, I can perhaps understand why the Camino team omitted it from their project, but I was still a bit bummed about that.

I checked for tabbed-browsing and, sure enough, it has there (Apple-T opened a new tab, just like Firebird). And, all the familiar keyboard shortcuts worked as well (such as Apple-L to load the URL bar). But, Camino didn’t react to the right mouse button as I expected. I right-cliked on the Back button and only got a context menu for configuring the toolbar (not a list of sites that I could go back to).

I really wanted to like Camino, but it just didn’t feel right to me. Sure, maybe I could find some work-around to the Back-button right-click bit, but there’d still be the DOM Inspector issue. And, now that Firebird has DOM Inspector built-in, there’s not much of an incentive for anyone to create a DOM Inspector browser extension either.

My best bet may be a matter of getting native widgets into Firebird instead of trying to get all of Firebird’s functionality into Camino :-/. But, I don’t have my hopes up about that either; a quick search of Bugzilla for “widget” bugs on Mac OS didn't come up with anything useful. Perhaps there’re no plans to make use of native Mac widgets on Firebird — maybe the Firebird developers perceive that Camino has filled that role.