posts brought to you by the category “prudish
americans”
Das eez kaput! Sometime around 2002 I spaced the entire database
table that mapped individual entries to categories. Such is life.
What follows is a random sampling of entries that were associated
with the category. Over time, the entries will be updated and then it
will be even more confusing. Wander around, though, it's still a fun
way to find stuff.
Excerpted : The News from Lake Dirty Dishes
May 23, 2003
Montreal
The Friday before last was squid and fish night. We started with a squid
and tomato soup-stew style dish, which was followed by red snapper baked
in rock salt and green beans and saffron rice with pistachios. People
seemed happy enough with the second course, but the timing was off and I
thought everything fell 2-3 minutes on either side of being done.
Part of the timing problem was having to peel a bunch of apples and stuff
them with raisins and nutmeg and red wine so they could bake while we ate
the fish. They were good, but if I did it again I would use port and
dates or maybe prunes. They were also really just there to serve as an
bridge (which shouldn't be interpreted as anything but a fancy way of
saying excuse) for cheese (Victor & Berthold and a Pied de Vent) and the
real dessert which were profiterolles au chocolat. The former doesn't
sound too crazy after fish but it was hard to imagine the latter.
By the time dessert rolled around, we'd lost Leguminosae and Erythronium
leaving me and Philemon and Papaveraceae and the bottle of limoncello (the
bottle of grappa having been emptied in to the Princess's birthday
cake a few weeks earlier; I am still trying to train friends from
Montreal to drink the stuff, but meeting with little success.)
The profiterolles were the surprise of the night because the worked. I had
made them earlier in January and not really knowing what I was doing
thought they'd be good made the day and kept under wrap. They were tasty
but I was unaware that they also begin to collapse about 4 seconds after
you take them out of the oven. So this time I made them from scratch and
owing to general insecurity and the fact that I was good and liquored by
now, convinced myself that I had somehow screwed up the batter. I'd
forgotten that the batter can be fairly liquid and that they puff up in
the oven, so I baked some indelicately large profiterolles which were
tasty and puffed up right fine in the oven. It is just as well really
since no one was up for a second round of the things.
Amazingly there was still beer in the fridge at the end of the night.
Sometime in the next couple weeks, I'll do squid night again but try to
keep things simpler this time. Baked stuffed squid, with potatoes fried in
bacon fat and homemade mayonnaise (aside from the fact that it only keeps
for ~3 days and that I don't even like the stuff very much, it boggles the
mind that people buy the stuff!) Some sliced tomatoes with dill and a
light salad. I might try making ice cream the old-skool way (like the 17th
century) where you don't actually spin the container but just plunge it in
a big bucket of salt/ice for a couple hours before serving. We'll see.
Thursday was Papaveraceae's book launch and she and Philemon and I
went to the Pied du Cochon for a quick bite before the Big Event. The
restaurant is worth the price you pay but it's not cheap and it is
busy being written up as the "place to go" in all manner of newspapers
and magazines. I took Oenothera there for her birthday. Since then I've
wanted to go back just as they open their doors, in the evening, to
sit at the bar and have a beer and the onion soup and watch the
kitchen staff and leave before the night's rush begins in earnest.
Which is pretty much what we did, or I did anyway. Papaveraceae
decided to do more 'research' for an upcoming article and started
ordering a bunch of little things from the apperizer menu like
heart-attack in a bag (pork rinds, I think) and a plate of meats
including deer tongue (surprisingly good) and Cromiski (sp?) de foie gras.
The latter are usually talked about anytime the restaurant is reviewed.
They are die-sized cubes of foie gras that are deep fried in some magic
way that they are solid and crispy on the outside but the foie gras has
been liquified on the inside, but no so that it burns your mouth. Philemon
ordered ceviche which despite the rule against ordering fish in a
meat-place (does it count if it's a pork place?) was delicious.
I had the onion soup which was just what I wanted and a good thing because
it provided me with enough substance to soak up all the beer that was to
follow. Papaveraceae was not so fortunate but still managed to sound
chipper and friendly as she answered questions on the one of the radio
call-in shows the next day.
Jeni Tennison : Comparing Documents [in XSLT]
This page will hold information about how to compare several XML
documents with each other using XSLT and give information about their
differences.
NY Times : Galatoire's Sweet Potato Cheesecake
Angela Lewis : Hoax E-mails and Bonsai Kittens: Are You E-literate
in the Docuverse?
Our social mantra is very much 'is Internet, is good', and our
logic is often placed around a misguided belief that if the
information was found on the 'Net, then it must be good'.
This paper discusses the importance of not only having the skills
of computer literacy, that is defined as being able to use computers
and software to navigate the Internet, but also the importance of
information literacy, defined as the skill of being critically
literate.
I'll slideshow you mine.
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : subterfuge
Subterfuge \Sub"ter*fuge\, n. [F., from LL. subterfugium,
fr. L. subterfugere to flee secretly, to escape; subter under + fugere
to flee. See {Fugitive}.] That to which one resorts for escape or
concealment; an artifice employed to escape censure or the force of an
argument, or to justify opinions or conduct; a shift; an evasion.
Affect not little shifts and subterfuges, to avoid the force of an
argument. --I. Watts. By a miserable subterfuge, they hope to render
this position safe by rendering it nugatory. --Burke.
web1913
subterfuge n : something intended to misrepresent the true
nature of an activity; "he wasn't sick--it was just a subterfuge"; "the
holding company was just a blind" [syn: {blind}]
wn
Gen Kanai : "For to us, pho is life, love and all things that
matter."
Greg Radzykewycz : Setting up a FreeBSD firewall with an IPSec
uplink
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : space
phone
Q wireless telephone..
ex. Honey, where's the space phone?
Simon Cozens : Mail::Miner
"Suppose every mail you receive gets sent through
a little program before delivery. This little program does several
things. It strips off any attachments, and stores them in an SQL
database, adding a note to the end of the email pointing out the ID
number of the attachment in the database. It also stores information
about who the mail was sent from, the subject line, the date, some
keywords as determined by Text::Keywords, and so on. The add-on
"recogniser" modules get hold of the email and try to pull out various
things - email addresses, patches, phone numbers, mailing addresses, and
so on."
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : demagogue
Demagogue \Dem"a*gogue\ (?; 115), n. [Gr. dhmagwgo`s a
popular leader; commonly in a bad sense, a leader of the mob; dh^mos
the people + 'agwgo`s leading, fr. 'a`gein to lead; akin to E. act: cf.
F. d['e]magogue.] A leader of the rabble; one who attempts to control
the multitude by specious or deceitful arts; an unprincipled and
factious mob orator or political leader.
web1913
demagogue n : an orator who appeals to the passions and
prejudices of his audience [syn: {demagog}, {rabble-rouser}]
wn
The Connection on the NYC Jewish Museum's "Mirroring Evil"
exhibit.
"Taking ownership of horror is unnerving, and the
show has set off a furious debate over Holocaust imagery, over how far
you can stretch an artistic representation of this history before it
becomes evil itself."
Tom Berger : jabber.el
"is a functional jabber client that runs on top
of emacs. i decided to construct it because i wanted one. currently the
client is very minimal, and supports what i need to chat with my friends
and family..."
The dictified dictionary.com word of the day is : voluble
Voluble \Vol"u*ble\, a. [L. volubilis, fr. volvere,
volutum, to roll, to turn round; akin to Gr. ? to infold, to inwrap, ?
to roll, G. welle a wave: cf. F. voluble. Cf. F. {Well} of water,
{Convolvulus}, {Devolve}, {Involve}, {Revolt}, {Vault} an arch,
{Volume}, {Volute}.] 1. Easily rolling or turning; easily set in
motion; apt to roll; rotating; as, voluble particles of matter. 2.
Moving with ease and smoothness in uttering words; of rapid speech;
nimble in speaking; glib; as, a flippant, voluble, tongue. [Cassio,] a
knave very voluble. --Shak. Note: Voluble was used formerly to indicate
readiness of speech merely, without any derogatory suggestion. ``A
grave and voluble eloquence.'' --Bp. Hacket. 3. Changeable; unstable;
fickle. [Obs.] 4. (Bot.) Having the power or habit of turning or
twining; as, the voluble stem of hop plants. {Voluble stem} (Bot.), a
stem that climbs by winding, or twining, round another body. --
{Vol"u*ble*ness}, n. -- {Vol"u*bly}, adv.
web1913
voluble adj : marked by a ready flow of speech; "she is an
extremely voluble young woman who engages in soliloquies not
conversations" [ant: {taciturn}]
wn
The random pseudodictionary.com word of the day is : borality
The ethical conduct between bores
ex. When Max recounted two consecutive fishing trips I
think I spoke for all when I reminded him of the borality of the
situation.
I don't really know if I think the iLamp will be a hit
O'Reillynet : IPsec Tunneling Between FreeBSD Hosts
see also: the FreeBSD Diary on
stunnel
Richard L. Chase : Simmer Stock
"is meant to be a collection place for ideas and
recipies for all the dinners I've thought of and cooked over the years,
and all the tips, tricks and resources I've managed to gather. I'm nudged
frequently by family, friends and colleagues to write down recipies for
the stuff I cook. Of course, recipies are actually for whimps - I haven't
really used recipies (other than as sources for ideas) in years. But
there is a lot of knowledge of cooking - techniques, ingredients, tools
and meals - sitting in my head that I could and should, as I would say in
my real-world job, store in some sort of repository."
Tamara Munzner and Paul Burchard : Visualizing the Structure of the
World Wide Web in 3D Hyperbolic Space
"We visualize the structure of sections of the
World Wide Web by constructing graphical representations in 3D hyperbolic
space. The felicitous property that hyperbolic space has ``more room''
than Euclidean space allows more information to be seen amid less
clutter, and motion by hyperbolic isometries provides for mathematically
elegant navigation."
Me : Blogger.pm 0.5.3
Gerald Richter : Overview of mod_perl 2.0
I've been asked to "get in [my] own mud bog and post [my] own
ideas. [To] take a stand."
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is filial
| source : web1913 | Filial \Fil"ial\, a. [L.
filialis, fr. filius son, filia daughter; akin to e. female, feminine.
Cf. {Fitz}.] 1. Of or pertaining to a son or daughter; becoming to a
child in relation to his parents; as, filial obedience. 2. Bearing the
relation of a child. And thus the filial Godhead answering spoke.
--Milton. | source : wn | filial adj 1: (genetics) designating the
generation or the sequence of generations following the parental
generation [ant: {parental}] 2: relating to or characteristic of or
befitting an offspring; "filial respect" [ant: {parental}]
The dict-ified dictionary.com word of the day is martinet
| source : web1913 | Martinet \Mar"ti*net`\, n.
[So called from an officer of that name in the French army under Louis
XIV. Cf. {Martin} the bird, {Martlet}.] In military language, a strict
disciplinarian; in general, one who lays stress on a rigid adherence to
the details of discipline, or to forms and fixed methods. [Hence, the
word is commonly employed in a depreciatory sense.] | source : web1913 |
Martinet \Mar"ti*net`\, n. [F.] (Zo["o]l.) The martin. | source : wn |
martinet n : someone who demands exact conformity to rules and forms
[syn: {disciplinarian}, {moralist}]
Matt Keranen : jet2sql.py
"Creates ANSI SQL DDL from a MS Jet database
file, useful for reverse engineering database designs in E/R tools."
Object by Design : XSLT by Example
"These pages ... shift the focus toward the
nitty-gritty details of writing XSLT stylesheets."
Joshua Allen : OPML and XSLT
"Since OPML is designed to represent information
that real people usually want to look at, and since web browsers are
accustomed to dealing with hierarchical data, OPML is an ideal fit. The
following files allow you to view, edit, and format OPML files in a web
browser..."
Mark Fowler : A Perl Module Advent Calendar
"This goes along way to proving what I always
say: I come up with the best ideas when I'm hung over."
Me : Favorites::Convert.pm
The other day I came across a Perl script on
Freshmeat that
converts
your IE (Win) favorites into a Netscape bookmarks file
. I tried it out and thought wouldn't it be cool if I could make other
bookmarkish files from my IE favorites. [I am no big fan of Microsoft but
the fact remains that they have the best browser on the market right
now.] So I chunked out the code and put it in a module and told it load
other modules depending on what kind of output file you're after. As of
this writing Favorites::Convert will generate plain old HTML, XBEL and
OPML files. Still to do : proper documentation ( don't worry there's a
test script that calls the single public method ), indentation /
pretty-printing and moving the bookmark definition information into XML
files so they can be read by other languages.
Database Debunkings
"The Forum Where Database Matters Are Set
Straight."
Leah McLaren : "Open Letters was conceived in the dark heart of
last winter,
when Paul Tough met Ian Brown for a pint at the
Munster Hall, a traditional English alehouse in downtown Toronto. The two
journalists met to talk about ideas. Tough, a Toronto-born editor who cut
his teeth at Harpers magazine in New York, had recently resigned from his
position as editor of Saturday Night magazine and was in the process of
deciding what do with the rest of his life -- or at least where to direct
his energy after he packed up his desk. He told Brown, a freelance writer
and the host of CBC Radio's Talking Books, about a project he had been
mentally toying with for a while. It involved letters. A whole magazine
of letters, in fact."
I think websites need more sound effects
Salon : Of flea markets and file swapping
"The swap meet provided support service like
parking, booth space, advertising and clientele. Here, Napster supplies
the proprietary software, search engine, servers and means of
establishing a connection between users' computers. Without the support
services defendant provides, Napster users could not find and download
the music they want with the ease of which defendant boasts." see also :
Wired : Only News That's Fit to Link
I, for one, am less than impressed with 120seconds.com
Aside from the fact that the site seems to be
little more than an exercise in gratuitous plug-in usage, it is almost
completely forgetable. I remember seeing a link to the site from the main
CBC site
a couple months ago. The link disappeared a day later --bad-- but even
worse, until
Michael
and
Ed
each mentioned it a couple days ago I could not for the life of me
*remember* what the site was called. 180 seconds ... no, maybe 90 ...
well, it's a bunch of something .. oh forget it. 120 seconds?? I've been
known to be a little dense sometimes, occasionally describing Montreal as
an island surrounded by water, but I can't see any connections here. Two
minutes of what, exactly? Is it supposed to represent the attention span
of their target audience? Maybe instead of buying all the propellor heads
new versions of Flash to make the site still more annoying, the CBC could
spend some money promoting the damn thing and telling us what it is.
The Big Move 2.0
has begun. Regular programming will resume
sometime next week. In the meantime, I'll leave you with these three
words :
nineteen foot Cadillac
.
Also in the Go Forth and Make Money department :
why has no one announced -- even as vapourware --
a cell phone
module
for my Visor?
Mark Kingwell
"Focusing on income levels while ignoring other
factors can only lead to a skewed assessment of citizen well-being. But
perhaps the time has come for those of us on the left to acknowledge that
plunging average income is no longer something we can simply shrug off.
Sure money isn't everything, but declines in income, set against a
cultural background of relentless wealth-celebration, can't help but
generate relative poverty. Poverty creates envy. And envy, felt
consistently and acutely enough, leads to many other social ills we
cannot so easily ignore, like crime and riots and beggars on the street."
A. Sundararajan : A proposal for Dynamic XML with DOM and
Scripts
Interesting, but all the dynamism appears to be
time-based. If that's the only trick it can do then I'm afraid that DXML
is basically still-born.
David O. Russell : The Indie Scale
"Let's try it again. If your film combines Rural
Life and Homosexuality and then factors in the additional element of
Strange Violence, you get 40 points, and such winning projects as "Boys
Don't Cry" and "My Own Private Idaho." Or try Murder and Homosexuality,
which combine for such recent attention getters as "Flawless" and "The
Talented Mr. Ripley." "
Doc Searls : Talking Jabber
"The architecture we're building includes instant
messaging. But it's just one piece. What we're doing is pushing
structured data--pieces of XML--between clients, between servers, between
different software agents. We're pushing XML data around the network."
J. David Eisenberg : Meet the DOM
Dan Brian : Lingua::Wordnet
"impersonates the basic Wordnet API functions for
searching and retrieving data, as well as adding, editing, and deleting
synsets. Lingua::Wordnet::Analysis brings the interface up a level,
allowing commands like "is 'yellow' an attribute of any 'birds'", and
taking care of the recursive analysis." Looks like
my prayers
have been answered, but what is a
synset
? see also :
WordNet::Query
Claude Ryan
"Accordez-vous au gouvernement du Québec le
mandat de réaliser l'indépendance du Québec et sa séparation politique du
Canada, en conformité avec la Constitution canadienne?" see also : the
already much linked-to
I am
Canadian
. (quicktime) This is an hilarious commercial. It is a real shame,
therfore, that it is for such terrible beer. For those of you who think
that drinking Molson is exotic, I assure you it's not. No matter what
part of the world you are reading this from, I bet there is a superior
local micro-brew. Really.
mmmmmm...doughnuts.
Ralph Steadman : Collected Gardening Hints
Found while looking for (seemingly non-existent)
websites with images from [
his
] book "I Leonardo".
Electronic Privacy Information Center : Surfer Beware III
"For the purpose of this survey, we looked at
several elements of the Fair Information Practices, including the ability
to find the privacy policy of an e-commerce site, whether personal
information is collected and used with the consent of the consumer,
whether the consumer is able to access and correct such information,
whether the information is limited to those uses for which the
information was given, and whether the purposes for which information
will be used are specified."
Computer Currents : Profiling Worse Than Subliminal
"While online profiling is in its infancy, it
could become far more insidious than subliminal advertising - a practice
that was never really proven to work, [Jason] Catlett said. "If
advertisers took a graphic of your newly born daughter and started using
it to sell you baby clothes," that would be far worse than inserting
hidden ad messages between movie frames, Catlett contended."
The World on United Future Organization
"We want to unsquare the squares." (real evil g2)
Perl::Flash modules
mmmmmmm .... unprocessed fish sticks! via
<a href =
"http://www.linkwatcher.com/metalog/">linkwatcher</a>
The American Bankers Association has written a Y2K Sermon
The slashdot kiddies ask : What is art?
"After all if everyone could do it, it wouldn't
be art, would it? It would be just another craft. And if everyone could
appreciate good code the way I appreciate the Impressionists then it
would be 'Classical' (read 'Dead') Art." Stick to writing code, buddy.
You don't want to touch the arts vs. craft debate with a ten foot pole.
an excerpt
(from email to
SuperBang
) "" This seems to be going around these days. I wonder if it's seasonal.
Nothing seems to happen in August, ginving people lots of time to think
about what the last 11 months of changing the world really means. August
seems to be when the Stock Market panics.
Web Reference : PHPhoo
How to build a Yahoo-style site using PHP and
MySQL. "As Spider Man always said, with Great Power comes Great
Responsibility. Put the coffee cup down, remove the cat from your lap,
and concentrate. One false step here and it'll be the last time your
database administrator lets you anywhere near the server, so pay
attention."
Hemp News
Deconstructing Ira
"He appears to be normal."
Alistair Cooke : Letters From America
Me Mom & Morgentaler, together again for the very first
time
"It's like we're supposed to be mega-upset
because we didn't become cocaine-sniffing, therapist-visiting,
fancy-car-driving stars. Like that was the point of life or something.
Actually, we set a goal when we started: TO BECOME THE #1 BAND IN THE
MONTREAL SCENE. A goal that I think we definitely accomplished, so all
this talk of failure is complete bullshit. We were a success. We took it
as far as it could possibly go and that was it. Life goes on."
wtf?
-
dude, where's my car
This document uses
CSS
kung-fu and a small amount of JavaScript for rendering its
contents. Efforts have been made to separate the form from the
content so if you are viewing this in a text-based browser it
shouldn't be an issue.
On the other hand it may look funny if you are viewing it in a
browser with incomplete
CSS
and/or JavaScript implementations. Internet Explorer 6 comes to
mind.
It's not that I don't love you. However, my time is limited and
I no longer feel very good about spending it working around any one
browser's inconsistencies with little, or no, confidence that they
will ever be fixed or otherwise made more inconsistent at some
later date.
On the other hand, if something is down-right
unreadable
please let me know and I will endeavour to fix it.
-
yes, we have no bananas
This page may not validate. It's not that I don't care, it's
just that I'm not aware of it yet. Part of the reason that I
rewrote the entire back-end for managing this site is that the old
stuff made it too easy for these kinds of mistakes to slip through
the cracks.
See also :
W3C::LogValidator.pm
-
it's the software, stupid
Use the source, Luke.
