Galactic Jane Austen

Having been overdosing on bad Photoshop contests recently, it was a pleasure to come across this slightly twisted little page, which presents, um, “alternate” characters and scenes in the works of Jane Austen that draw on the works of Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas. I think my favorite is Chewbacca as Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice:

“Oh, Han Solo, you have no compassion on my poor nerves… wrowloughoooow!”

Thanks to Anita for the pointer.

Doc in Hell

It looks like Doc Searls’s slow descent into hardware hell continues. After several mangled laptops and a lost (and returned) AirPort base station, in the last few days he has had his laptop and glasses stolen from his car and an Ethernet failure on his backup machine. Someone had better sacrifice a chicken to Murphy, quick.

Praying for time

I was going to post something else here, but just got an email that an old friend of mine from growing up days has cancer. We’re all hoping that Rob pulls through. This is his second run in with cancer; the first, which he had as a child, robbed him of his sight. I’m not often a praying man, but I’m praying that this new cancer won’t take more.

Gumbo in our time

Last Sunday I promised myself gumbo. As you might guess, between work, mounting drawers, and this cold I woke up with today, I am just now getting around to it. After all, chicken and shrimp gumbo almost qualifies as chicken soup.

I have a long, somewhat troubled history with gumbo. The first time I ever made the dish, it was for about forty people at the beach. So I was accustomed to preparing huge proportions. Subsequent times out, I never quite figured out how much (or how little) roux I needed, with the result that you could stand a spoon in the gumbo it was so thick. (This may have had to do with the fact that I used okra and filé as thickeners). My wife eventually got to the point where she refused to eat it. This just strengthened my resolve to lighten it up enough that she would like it.

(A word on okra: when I grew up I didn’t know you were supposed to hate the stuff. Mom breaded it and fried it with potatoes and it was fantastic, chewy-crisp and flavorful. I wasn’t that impressed with how it did in gumbo, but this cookbook I found said you’re actually supposed to fry it first to get rid of any residual “sliminess,” then add it to the gumbo. This may be specifically a Creole vs. Cajun thing, I’m not sure.

But here’s the thing: this cookbook called for using either okra or filé (a powder made from sassafras and sage), but not both. And since I was trying to find a recipe she would like, I reluctantly held off on the okra this time.)

So anyway, this was the recommended sequence of events:

  1. Brown the chicken in oil (I used Crisco because the only other stuff at hand was olive oil and rice oil, both of which had flavors I didn’t want in the final product). Remove the chicken to a plate
  2. Make a roux with the same oil. (Roux can be tricky. In a nutshell:
    • Equal volumes of oil and flour (I used a half cup this time; my previous recipes had me using a full cup)
    • get the oil hot but not smoking (make sure you’re using a high sided pot so you don’t spatter yourself)
    • add the flour a bit at a time and stir
    • keep stirring and scraping the bottom of the pot until the roux goes from white to pale beige to brownish to the color of a 1979 penny you found in your driveway.
  3. Add chopped bell peppers (I use red, yellow, and green for color) and onion and stir them in the roux until soft.
  4. Add garlic, hot pepper (I used a serrano, sans seeds), seasoning (bay leaf, thyme, a dash of allspice, a little Pickapeppa sauce, salt, pepper), and chicken stock. Cook for about an hour.
  5. Add the chicken and correct the seasoning (with the hot pepper sauce of your choice).
  6. About ten minutes before serving add the shrimp.
  7. If you plan to eat all the gumbo at this sitting, stir in some filé powder off the heat; otherwise, stir a little into each bowl. (Apparently when you reheat the gumbo with the filé already in it, it makes the gumbo thick and ropy. Not desirable.)
  8. Serve over rice.

And that’s that. And, man, it’s good stuff. If I erred, it was on the side of too little hot sauce; but that’s easily remedied at the table. Hopefully Lisa will like it this time.

Best laid plans

I had all kinds of things I was going to try to do today. A few of them are off my list, since I slept until noon. Ah well. —Waking up listening to Murmur, which (Greg points out) the band finished recording at Reflection Studios in Charlotte, NC twenty years ago this month.

Weapons inspection goin’ on at Moxie’s

Moxie: Weapons inspection. Brilliant riff on how easy it is to turn the administration’s prelude to war into a bad joke:

I’m kind of hesistant to go out tonight. No, not because of the elevated terror threat but because I think it’s only a matter of time until wankers in bars start using this stuff to get tail:

“The UN passed resolution 69 which clearly states I get some ass this weekend. If I don’t, the terrorists win.”

Don’t miss the comments section, which I (ahem) had some input into.

QTN™: Kerst Pater Winter Ale

Kerst Pater Special Winter Ale: Another Belgian beer today, another winter ale. Will I ever get tired of either? Not as long as I have taste buds and it’s cold out. —On the pour you know this beer is serious. It looks totally black, but when held to the light it reveals a winey red deep within. Head poured dense and tall, rising about half an inch above the top of my glass before subsiding without incident or spillover. Nose complex, yeasty, a little spicy, a little pine note giving a hint of hops to come. Tasting: big malt up front, lingering kiss of hops at the end. Spicy all right, but not overwhelmingly so. Just a deep bready flavor with hints of nutmeg on the way down.

On hunting the Dog

I was wondering where Greg had gotten to; turns out it’s a Black Dog issue. Glad to see you back, Greg, and don’t apologize for taking time off. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

He also points to a possible source for the Black Dog metaphor: Winston Churchill. I didn’t have any idea that Churchill was depressive, much less that he used this analogy, but I dug deeper and found a book about it:
Churchill’s Black Dog, by Anthony Storr, a series of essays on the success of creative individuals and their motivations.

Waiting for George

On Saturday three of my favorite people will be flying into SeaTac. George and Becky are coming out for a visit with some relatives (and maybe a little beer tasting). Should be a good time all around.

Who’s the third? Why, that would be my all time favorite person, returning from Boston.

Prescience

WriteTheWeb: The writeable web: lather, rinse, repeat (an interview with NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons). I’m a few days late picking up this item; the last time I went to look at it I couldn’t reach the website. But it’s still good reading on a bunch of levels: application developers, bloggers, Internet philosophy, and on.

I do want to call attention to Brent’s last statement:

Ideally writing for the web should be about as easy as writing something in TextEdit. Create it, write it, save it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Compare to this statement, made in these pages in October 2001:

I write this blog from an unaccustomed place: Apple’s TextEdit application. That I’m doing it from a text processor isn’t in and of itself unusual; normally I write my blog in BBEdit before uploading it to the web. The unusual part is that this blog will be published to the web without my opening a web browser.

This is what I started writing about in July when Apple quietly announced that they would make support for web services–web applications that can be addressed using either XML-RPC or SOAP–available in the operating system and accessible via AppleScript in Mac OS X 10.1. Yesterday I wrote a short AppleScript (available for download) that uses SOAP to call web services belonging to Manila, the publishing system that hosts this blog. The script takes the content of the topmost TextEdit window and makes it a story on my website.

Brent is right that writing for the web should be easy. That was the vision that drove me down the path of my first scripts, which allowed blogging from that simple text editor. Somewhere, though, it got complicated again. My Manila Envelope is not the most friendly writing UI I’ve ever seen. NetNewsWire’s blogging interface is the best so far I’ve seen, but it feels like an interface. Writing in a text processor feels different. Are we always doomed to have this layer of separation between us and the process of sharing our thoughts?

Houseguest

I heard a tapping this morning as I was getting dressed, coming from the north wall of the bedroom. I’ve heard this before this week, so I decided it was time to see what was up. I tiptoed around the back corner of the house, and there was a bird, not moving, watching me, parked under one of the soffit vents under the eaves of the house.

I’m not sure whether it’s broken through the screen and has built a nest or whether it’s just looking for food, but I know I can’t do a lot about it without getting a taller ladder. The soffit vent is almost two stories up, and there’s no attic from inside to access that part of the roofline.

I took a few pictures of our newest house guest this morning, but I forgot that Lisa has the USB cable I use to get pictures from the camera to the computer. It was a brown bird with a spot of bright red color near its beak—I couldn’t see the pattern exactly and it flew away before I could take the picture.

More Shape

Rogers Cadenhead does some snooping in Alexa and discovers (along with graphical comparisons of blog traffic) some interesting things about some of our favorite blog hosters:

Adam Vandenberg (aka Flangy) thinks his prominence is less due to merit than the fact that a lot of people are moving off EditThisPage. Au contraire. (Although there are certainly people moving off EditThisPage.)

And Dave wonders why his Slashdotting looks like 5000 reads, while Joel Spolsky’s looks like 400,000. Well, I can’t explain two orders of magnitude, Dave, but one order might just be a difference in methodology. The stats in Manila and Radio (and SiteMeter) present summaries of visits and page views, and don’t count things like graphics loads as hits (though Manila, at least, counts RSS downloads). I don’t know about Joel’s software, but if he’s looking at more raw web traffic data, he’ll see a hit for every image on his page in addition to the page view itself.

Finding the Shape

I have meant to blogroll Ross Mayfield’s weblog for a while, but it took his linking to me a second time (after I jokingly compared him to Gibson’s Gentry) to get around to it. Ross’s site is the best around for pointers to publicly accessible data about the shape of the Internet. These days if I have questions about how fast the Net is growing, how its users are distributed, what its mechanism of growth looks like I look to Ross first. This morning, for instance he points to a paper by NEC researchers that says that the old “power law” explanation for the popularity of web sites (the most popular attract more links than the newer entries) doesn’t hold across all categories. He goes on to suggest that the falling barrier to entry for web publishing may also be a factor.