Random Bytes...by Ross Rader

Sunday, November 30

[08:13AM EST]

I was just looking at my blog and realized that my TuneRoll was kind of
stale. Which made me realize that I've been spending too much time
downloading and not enough time buying. I think I'm going to pick up
some Audioslave and Jane's Addiction today or tomorrow - they've both
been heavily targetted in my WinMX sessions lately and both have
outstanding work that they deserve to be paid for.

I've bought more music in the three years that I've been "stealing it"
(thanks for the great label Hillary!) than I did in the three years prior
to that. C (6) | T (40) | #

Saturday, November 29

[10:55PM EST]

I went a little bit crazy with an eastern menu this evening. Lots of tasty little bits. I also blogged some basic tips and tricks that I find helpful. Let me know if you enjoy this sort of thing as much as I enjoyed setting it up ;) C (2) | T (146) | #

[10:47PM EST] I tried out something new last night that turned out to be just delicious. Once in a while we'll have red meat. My favorite way of prepping this is to take a very nice cut of steak and have the butcher cut it more like a roast than a steak. We're talking at least two inches thick. Once I get it home, I'll pierce it liberally with a fork and then rub it down with fresh garlic and good olive oil - its more of a massage than anything else.

You know that its cool to stop the massage when the meat has warmed up to almost room temperature. I'll then place it on a plate and douse it with some good balsamic vinegar.

Now onto the something new I tried last night - Chayoate squash. These little guys are great. I cut one in half and boiled it for about 15 minutes in a mixture of half water and half chicken stock. I used just enough to cover the squash. While this was boiling up, I made a cold salsa consisting of shallots, seeded roma tomatoes, some vidalia onions, a smidge of red chili flakes and a little bit of balsamic and olive oil. I set this aside so the flavors could blend.

At this point I tossed a large cast iron frying pan into the oven to let them both heat to 450 degrees.

Back to the squash. I remove them from heat, took them out of the broth and scooped the flesh out of the squash. In a frying pan, I heated up some olive oil and sauteed roughly 1 cup of vidalia and a little bit of shallot and some garlic - all finely chopped. Once the mixture started to get transparent, I increased the heat a little bit and started to slowly ladle the chayoate broth into the frying pan, constantly stirring the mixture as the broth reduced, and adding more until all of the broth had been absored into the mixture and a nice sauced hard started to develop.

I then poured the onion mixture into a bowl with the pulp from the squash mashed everything until it was nicely blended (and not caring about the odd chunk). This was then spooned back into the squash shells, drizzeled with a little bit of olive oil and tossed into the oven until the top had browned. As I put the squash in, I pulled the frying pan out and put it on the top of the stove.

I then placed the beef into the pan and seared both sides. There's no real need to actually turn on one of the burners because the pan will be very hot by this point. Once you've got some color on the top and bottom of the steer, drop it back into the oven for as long as you like. Personally, I like mine done pretty rare, so 8 to 10 minutes is enough for me.

Once the meat is done, I let it rest for a few minutes, sliced it thin and then topped it with the salsa I had created earlier. I served it along side the squash and some baby vegetables that roasted up.

Yum.

During my trip to chinatown today, I notice that these little squashes can actually be found a lot cheaper than what I'd bought them at the day before - just 59 cents a pound! These little guys will definitely find their way into a lot of meals in the near future. C | T (352) | #

Friday, November 28

[03:07PM EST] I forgot to mention this when we fixed it a few weeks back - Blogware is no longer arbitrarily truncating RSS 2.0 feeds ;)

Still no resolution on whether we're going to axe 0.91 support or not - I mean, its harmless enough, but I'm wary of providing too many options to non-technical users. C (2) | T (62) | #

[02:46PM EST]

On a slightly more positive note, the latest build of the Thunderbird mail client completely smokes. They've refined the UI a bit and it seems generally more responsive. I'm going to grab the latest Firebird in a second.

C | T (34) | #

[02:31PM EST]

I'm kind of bummed today.

One of the items I had on my todo list was a rather fun, Friday afternoon kind of thing. I was especially looking forward to it after doing yet another go round on the pending ICANN Transfer Policy contracts that a working group I'm sitting on is looking after.

The task was supposedly simple - check out the current status of XML-RPC Blog editors, do some feature comparisons (and maybe even fall in love with something enough to start using myself and recommend to my users).

This was amplified a little bit because the one that I currently use is stuck in side of Newzcrawler which seems to have developed the nasty habit of consuming 100% of the available CPU resources on my box - totally suxors when you have it running in the background and you can't check your email without shutting down your aggregator. I think it might have something to do with the number of feeds I subscribe to and number of items in those feeds...but I digress.

So I trolled around to the usual suspects, w.bloggar, SharpMT, Zempt and so on - and quickly realized that *nothing* has changed with these apps in the last seven months. In fact, a couple of them no longer worked with my setup - something that I've now got to track down to make sure that we didn't break something (even though we've done nothing to our MetaWebLog/Blogger API interfaces...in the last eight months.)

So I went out to find a new tool that might work and be really cool (I generally love using software that no one else is using - call it an bizarre expression of my individualism...) Problem there is that most them totally suxor *worse* than the tools that I was fleeing.

Someone really needs to step up to the plate here. There's a huge market for these tools - especially ones that work well with aggregators.

I've got $40 for the first developer that puts a non-sucking client into my hands.

C (7) | T (40) | #

Thursday, November 27

[09:55PM EST]

Windows XP: There is no reason for something this developed, this planned - this invested, to look like such absolute crap. more>> C | T (30) | #

[04:26PM EST] *****VIRUS WARNING*****

There is a new virus - code name is "Work." If you receive "Work" from
your colleagues, your boss, or anyone else, do not touch "Work" under
any circumstances. This virus wipes out your private life completely.
If you should happen to come in contact with this virus follow these steps:

1. Put on your jacket and take two good friends and your cash, go
straight to the nearest pub.

2. Order three drinks and repeat this 13 or 14 times... you will find
that "Work" has been completely deleted from your memory.

************************************************************************
Forward this virus warning immediately to at least 5 friends. Should you
realize that you do not have 5 friends, this means that you are already
infected by this virus and "Work" already controls your whole life. C | T (45) | #

Wednesday, November 26

[09:58AM EST] The Daily Summit: "Something to watch out for at WSIS - a compromise between the ICANN and Klein positions."

Sounds interesting until one realizes that Taussig doesn't even know enough about the issues to tell the difference between a document written with great thought and care and another written in a bar at Heathrow. C (2) | T (105) | #

Tuesday, November 25

[02:47PM EST] Caught this tagline today - wicked. It comes from Roland Tanglao - I didn't bother
asking him whether the tagline itself was exempt from the rule statement
;) He might be upset that I blogged this without asking...

this email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private

C (1) | T (130) | #

Monday, November 24

[10:12PM EST] I sent the Nokia in for repairs, but it never came back. It turns out that getting these thing fixed is a little bit uncommon, so its a bit of a PITA to get out-of-warranty service. Knowing full well that this meant that even if the phone was repairable that it would a) likely take forever and b) be real expensive I opted for something a little bit more cutting edge.

I rediscovered my love of Palm devices this time last year when I ditched my over-priced Toshiba e740 for a more practical Treo 90. At that time Elliot asked me why I just didn't spring for a Treo 180 like had just recently done. I can't remember if I told him this or not, but the answer was simple: I'm cheap and those 180's were pretty dear a year ago. A year later, they've come down in price to where I feel pretty comfortable sprining for the slightly nicer 270 that sports slightly better talk time and a color screen. Neat unit. I've only been with it for a few hours, but so far, it lives up to what I've come to expect from Palm based devices - it does what it is supposed to do and does it well.

Where the Treo 90 was a great handheld, this is a great handheld with great cellphone features. I'm already enjoying having my contact data all unified in one application - I'm sure that I'll continue to be pleased when I find other nifty new features that I didn't know about. Is it as "cool" as the newer Treo 600? Probably not. Is it worth every penny that I paid for it? Probably.

I'm looking for cool software that leverages the phone functions - drop me a note if you've got some hints that you want to pass on. C | T (382) | #