Good news, everyone. I am now allowed to walk normally, sans Go-Bot boot even. And by “normally” I mean I’m a bit stiff and hobbly and am using one crutch if I want to get up any speed, but it’s something isn’t it?
I got copies of all three x-rays from today and hope to scan them if I can find a big scanner. Until then, here’s a snapshot.
Original pre-move comment from headwrong:
You now have the ability to kick holes clean through your enemies.
Use it wisely, and often.
That’s probably a vast generalization, but that has been my experience. Take for example this blurb that appeared on Google News today:
Confusing, yes. Slightly humorous, yes. But not nearly as terrifying as the SQL error I just encountered logging out of a database I do user support for:
Warning: mssql_query() [function.mssql-query]: message: The log file for database ‘[database name]‘ is full. Back up the transaction log for the database to free up some log space. (severity 17) in [proprietary stuff]\scripts\sql.inc on line 86
[details about what fields could not be inserted, etc.]
Can’t login either. Because that goes in the log too. I have made all the phone calls I can. I am not at the office. Now we wait.
While I was making coffee this morning, it occurred to me that a lot of people don’t know how to make coffee properly. I’ve also gotten compliments on my coffee from friends (not to brag). I’ve been making coffee for about ten years, so I think I can probably safely provide some tips.
- Don’t buy crap coffee. Why people buy crap coffee is beyond me. Buy beans, and keep them in the fridge if you aren’t going to use them immediately. Good coffee isn’t cheap, but it’s cheaper than going out for coffee everyday; a pound canister at Trader Joe’s is 10 bucks; you can get the same amount for about the same price at regular grocery stores. And even if you spend up to 20 bucks on beans that will last a few weeks, compare that to spending 3 bucks a day for coffee at a coffeeshop.If you don’t want to grind at home, keep your fresh ground coffee in the freezer.
- Grind as you use. Self explanatory. You can get a decent coffee grinder for like 15 bucks. It’s like a mini food processor. You don’t even have to clean it that much; I only clean mine when I switch coffees. Follow the directions to get the kind of grind you need for the type of coffee pot you use, and voila.
- Don’t use a drip coffee pot. I mean, really. For the love of all that is good. Pretty much every office I’ve worked in has a drip pot, but that doesn’t mean you have to do that to yourself at home. Get a good electric percolator, stove-top glass percolator (you can get them on eBay), or French press (if you don’t need to make a ton of coffee at once). I use a French press (20-25 bucks at Target), but I’m just making coffee for me. Percolate it for family-size rounds of coffee. Or if you’re really addicted.
- Use clean water and make sure it gets hot enough. If your tap water sucks, and you filter it for drinking, filter it for coffee.If you use a percolator, make sure it’s steaming. If you use a French press, make sure the water is boiling before you pour.* Coffee is chemistry, and using water that’s not hot enough make crappy coffee.*An ORGer has pointed out that the boiling point can sometimes make burnt-tasting coffee. Try it both ways: heat water ’til boiling or heat water close to boiling. My problem with trying pre-boiling is that I get all anxious and pour it too soon. See what works best for you.
- Don’t brew too little or too long. This is the tricky part. You have to experiment. I usually brew for 3-5 minutes. Any less, and it’s too weak, but since you can also pretty much make espresso in a French press, leaving it in too long will make sludge. Electric percolators usually have a waffle-iron-like light that comes on when it’s the correct temperature and has brewed for a given period of time. This may be the correct amount of time for you. It may not. Experiment.
- Don’t add more milk and sugar than there is coffee. If you do that, all this is a waste. This also means you don’t really like coffee, so why are you drinking it?
Original pre-move comment from mattbot:
You should nail this list to the front door of Espresso Royale
Original pre-move comment from Imagine:
Ever blown up an espresso pot? It is an adventure. But not in the good adventure kind of way.
Original pre-move comment from mbr:
Good notes, General. The food-nerd consensus seems to be that water just off the boil (195 F or so) is your best bet for extracting all the good stuff without pulling out the nasty volatiles. Also, I can’t say I’ve tested it empirically, but ur-food-nerd Harold McGee offers the following bit of advice in ON FOOD AND COOKING: “Many municipal tap waters are intentionally made alkaline to reduce pipe corrosion, and this can reduce the acidity and liveliness of both tea and dark-roasted coffee (light roasts contribute plenty of their own acid). Alkaline tap water can be corrected by adding tiny pinches of cream of tartar—tartaric acid—until it just begins to have a slightly tart taste.” There you have it.
Original pre-move comment from me:
The only thing Espresso Royale makes well are those crazy cacao drinks.
And I have not blown up an espresso pot, Imagine. I hope no one was injured? I’m thinking of the scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s when the rice cooker explodes.
And I can always rely on your for well-researched cooking knowledge, mbr. Welcome to the platypus.
Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.
–Cat’s Cradle
I know the first page of my Flickr photostream is pretty ugly today, but I had to get the ankle pictures out of my system. If you are squeamish, think of fuzzy bunnies and don’t click. But if you dig this shit, clicky clicky clicky.
The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society has an article about the Mundaneum, a collection of 12 million 3″x5″ index cards that debuted in 1910 in Belgium, with the purpose of indexing all knowledge.
This is most interesting, I think, because that time period in Europe was marked by a distinct sidestep from this idea that all knowledge could be collected, which was a very Greek/Renaissance idea. The late 19th and 20th centuries were times of specialization and intellectual separation of disciplines, tempered by rabid imperialism (in some nations) and collection-building. In college I wrote a paper on museum culture in Britain at the crossroads of Victorian and Modern culture, based on evidence in literature of the time, and learned a good deal about how the middle and upper classes were obsessed with collecting everything from other countries to knicknacks.
The moral of the story is, I suppose, that as much as we try to be rational and divide up types of knowledge into different specialities, the very fact that we do that is a sign that those individual pieces of knowlege are part of a whole, and it’s very difficult to not want to figure out how they’re all connected. It’s very tempting to want to do it thoroughly and completely, as impossible as that is.
Over at the ORG we’re cooking up some brain crack antidote. Fellow ORGer transiit has come up with a way to come up with ideas: demand that other people give them to you (which is an idea in and of itself; ah, did you see how I did that?). So, we swapped ideas. His idea strung through my brain is below. You can see my idea strung through his at mmmm-donut.blogspot.com. We might do a little series.
preserved meats and their impact on religion
There used to be a wonderful website called The Potted Meat Museum, which provided excellent photos of potted meats: meats in cans, with colorful labels and strange names. (Originally potted meats were really in pots; in the 19th century you would go to the butcher and get your potted meat and it would be sealed in a ceramic pot with a nice healthy layer of fat.) But part of the mystique of potted meats is that hardly anyone knows anyone who eats them in earnest, only in jest.
Other preserved meats, not so: I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania and somehow emerged having never eaten jerky. Friends whose fathers hunted had jerky; mine did not, so I did not. But people love jerky. Somehow leathery preserved meat is better than potted meat? Is it the texture, the way it tears? Does it look more meatlike?
This brings us (obviously) to the question of transubstantiation: the belief that during the taking of communion, the papery wafer and the cheap wine (or grape juice, depending on how hardcore you are) actually turns into the body and blood of Jesus while you eat it. So you’re eating Jesus. If only for a second.
Even if you do not believe in transubstantiation (which I do not), it is still a curious ritual. Humans are a highly ritual species, whether that ritual is religious or whether it’s just having a cup of tea in the evening over the crossword. In the context of meat, a phrase that comes to mind is the ritual of slaughter.
For thousands of years humans hunted because they needed food. The very act of hunting burned up precious energy, leading to the obvious constant struggle to survive shared by all animals in need of the basics. As a result, hunting became highly ritualized; coming-of-age rituals often had to do with how a young adult hunted or gathered or otherwise contributed to the health of his or her family or tribal group. Animals that were killed in the hunt were revered and worshipped even as their bones were stripped. There was a great deal of thought put into the give and take of life. It was very difficult to keep meat fresh for any period of time, so eventually someone figured out what to do with the leftovers. Dry them out, smoke them, mire them in brine, lye, crust them with salt, hang them up, grind them up, add preservatives, puree them, can them.
What’s meat without ritual? Can eating meat that’s been preserved to last through a nuclear bomb blast be ritualized (aside from a fascinating visit to the Hormel factory)? Is it a coincidence that we now consumed preserved meat not out of necessity, but because it’s snack food? Or because it’s fun to mold animals out of (Spam)? Or does the local/grain-fed/organic meat trend signal a return to meaty ritual? Are we returning to our unpreserved roots? And, conversely, by eating tinned chicken livers are you turning your back on god?
Original pre-move comment from srah:
I grew up in a Protestant church where the bread/grape juice were symbols of the body and blood. Transubstantiation always creeped me out. When my mom told me about it, I asked her if that made Catholics vampires and cannibals.
Original pre-move comment from transiit:
No conversation about transubstantiation is complete without at least considering this: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/transubstantiation.html
This blog runs in Textpattern, and my “work” blog runs in WordPress, mostly as a development exercise. Textpattern is a little weird, but I’ve gotten used to it. WordPress is good for development because lots of businesses and organizations are starting to use it as a CMS.
On that note, I’ve been poking around in WordPress plugins lately for potential use for a site I’m working on for a local business, and here are some seemingly useful ones:
- Dagon Design’s Secure Form Mailer Plugin provides a scalable contact form with the ability to have multiple recipients and custom fields. It’s easy to install and just requires the creation of a page containing a bit of trigger code. The only potentially bothersome piece I’ve found is that it has a separate stylesheet that doesn’t install in the Theme Editor list of files, so it has to be edited locally and uploaded to the server, but I’m already doing that with Sandbox, so not a big deal.
- Kimili Flash Embed Plugin does what it sounds like. The same client would like a bit of flash sparklies for pretty (separate from content), so I’m hoping something like this works. Anyone have any experience with embedding Flash in WordPress?
- WP-Cache caches static versions of WordPress pages to speed up loadtime for content that doesn’t change, putting less stress on the database. Also seems like a potentially good idea. Anyone tried it?
All in all, I’m hoping to provide an easily updatable system that can be scalable. Textpattern is less user friendly but more robust, but WordPress has responded very well to user demand.
[leans in one direction]
Original pre-move comment from Brian:
WP-Cache—works fine if/when you make intelligent decisions about what to cache, and if you really need caching. (Is your local business client really going to get slashdotted/dugg/whatevr’d?)
Original pre-move comment from me:
Likely not. 
But it seems like a good backup in case they get wildly popular.
Original pre-move comment from Brian:
If you want, you can also configure WP-Cache and then toggle on and off automatically based on traffic level.
also you are a Twin Peaks person correct? http://joechip.net/brian/2007/04/05/twin-peaks-party-like-its-1991/
Original pre-move comment from me:
Toggling is good. Thanks for the tip!
And yes to the Peaks.
[does a little Audrey dance]
I would just like to say that my pre-ordered copy of season two of Twin Peaks, as well as my Mr. Bento (the two bowl, not the four: I’m not that hardcore) arrived in the mail yesterday.
That is all.
Original pre-move comment from srah:
Yay Mr Bento!
Google has launched Google Paper today.* One user testimonial just sums up so much info arch that I had to point it out:
“Now that I have Gmail Paper, I understand the difference between labels and folders. I had one message with two labels, but when I tried to stick the paper version into two filing cabinets at the same time, it just wouldn’t go.”
*You do remember what today is, right? Okay.
