Video from the new camera

As part of the preparations for the new baby (oh yeah, in case anyone reading this blog doesn't know - we're expecting offspring in March), I bought a video camera last week (a Canon Elura 100).

While visiting my parent's dairy farm for Thanksgiving, I made this short video on How to chew cud

Bowl bread

Saturday morning I started the process of making bread. After mixing and kneading, I heated the oven slightly (turn it on, turn it off after a couple of minutes) and put the dough in the oven to rise.

A couple hours later, some other member of our household (who will remain nameless to protect the identity of the guilty), despite having been warned of the bread dough in the oven, started the oven (to preheat it) without removing the dough.

Fortunately (*very* fortunately), the dough was in a metal bowl. When we went to put the chicken in the oven, we discovered, to our horror, that the bread dough was still in there, and well on its way to being baked. An executive decision was made to continue baking the bread on an experimental basis.

The bread baked (although with such a large loaf - it was supposed to make at least 4 regular loaves - the center still wasn't quite done), and came out of the pan quite easily (I had coated it with oil before letting it rise).

And now, I give you:

Bowl bread! (cue mad scientist laughter in the background)
(not to be confused with a bread bowl)

Don't confuse powdered wasabi with baking powder

Whilst making muffins, I noticed the proximity of the powdered wasabi and the baking powder on the shelf. This led me to contemplate the consequences of accidentally using the wasabi in the muffins.

(I mentioned this thought-mistake to my wife, and she said I should put on the blog. So here it is)

New Diet

I've been on this great(?) new diet. It lets me eat as much as I want, and no counting calories! I've lost over 15 pounds in just 3 weeks.

I call it the Mono/Pnuemonia diet.

The name isn't quite as catchy as those diets named after trendy places.

The tricky part (which I address in a chapter in my upcoming book) is how to contract mono and pnuemonia at the same time.

Sticky notes and moustaches

Over on JFKBits, Joel posted some ideas about Annotating web pages using a sticky notes model.

He created a very simple demo. I played with it and took a screenshot. It's quite possibly a shining example of the sort of juvenile behavior this sort of technology is *not* to be used for.

So this leads naturally (in my mind) to the idea of annotating web pages with virtual moustaches and glasses. The idea of virtual graffiti is very appealing as it satisfies two conflicting requirements:

1. The primal urge to change the world in silly ways.
2. The changes are not permanent (Note that I don't even like to make serious notes in my own books)

(In the comments of his post, Joel pointed a site with a similar idea www.mystickies.com. I didn't create an account and try it, mostly in an attempt to squelch the impulse to find a flat panel monitor ad and put virtual stickies all over the virtual bezel.)

Insult polishing

Tonight I mentioned to my wife that I needed to polish my insults - I needed to run them through the dis washer.

More breakfast blogs

In the course of important daily research, I ran across another breakfast blog. With an important difference - that blog actually talks about breakfast. What a concept.

Another difference is the focus on eggs (according to the tagline, anyway). I dislike eggs for breakfast. Any other time of day eggs are fine (as long as they are fully cooked), but they make me queasy in the morning.

Hot, fresh waffles on the road

I'm in Arizona, and the hotel I'm staying at offers one item that I've never seen before in a hotel breakfast. A waffle-maker. (And cups of waffle batter.) Pour in the batter, rotate the waffle iron to start the built-in timer (the other nifty feature is the waffle iron rotates), and 2 minutes later you have a hot, fresh waffle.

It was a tasty waffle.

According to reliable sources, at least one other hotel in the area has the same implement of fresh waffleness.

Illegal Sea Food

There's a place near my hotel that reads "Legal Sea Food" on the awning. I'm not sure if it's a store or a restaurant or something else.

Does this mean there is illegal sea food about?

I've only been in Baltimore a short time, but I haven't seen any shady characters in trench coats whispering "Hey budy, want some prawns?"

Saturday muffin blogging

Been a while since I've posted any pictures of breakfast foods. Time to get back to my blogging roots and rectify this great omission. This breakfast food picture even comes with a boring, pointless story.

Last week I had a hankering for muffins. Being somewhat competent in the kitchen, I set about on a quest to make some. I consulted my wife's "Joy of Cooking" tome for proper muffin making technique. The key is to keep the wet and dry ingredients separate as long as possible, and mix them just enough to get them sufficiently mixed. To the consternation of assorted bystanders, I actually *measured* most of the ingredients (okay, so I'm embellishing the story a bit - the only bystander was the cat, and he wasn't all that concerned.)

The pictured pineapple-coconut muffin is from my third batch (for the record, the first batch was blueberry, and the second batch was raspberry).

The recipe called for 4 teaspoons of baking powder. After reading the baking powder label, this seemed like a lot of sodium, so I reduced it to 2 teaspoons. The muffins still appeared to rise okay, and were still tasty.

Naming your new variables

There are these lists around of popular baby names for a given year. (No links, do your own Google search). I wonder what such a list would look like if someone did the same tabulation for variable names in programs? How would it change over the years? ("i" and "j" would probably be perennial favorites, with "idx","indx",and "index" not far behind)
Seeing the lists broken down by "ethnicity" (ie, programming language) would be interesting as well.

On a related note, expectant parents have books of baby names at their disposal for aid in choosing a name. I wonder if programmers could use such a resource to assist in naming their variables (and functions and namespaces, etc)?
(Actually, a thesaurus is handy for that purpose. (Ugh, I just answered my own rhetorical question))

Questions from the Edge

The Edge asks a big question annually. This year, it is: What is your dangerous idea? They have a pile of responses from scientists and other notable people. Many of them have to do with brain and biology, others have to do with religion and science, and there are sundry other topics discussed Give it a read (You'll have to scroll down a ways past all the blurbs to get the actual responses on the first page).