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Friday, December 25th, 2009
shevek
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9:05a
While everybody else is eating turkey, I will mostly be getting on a plane, which will NOT be cancelled today, honest, even though it's chrimble. I'm leaving Canada for a few days. Still now snow, just a touch of whiteness on the ground. You Europeans have it all (thankfully).
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(2 comments | comment on this) Thursday, December 24th, 2009
mengwong
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3:53p
Christmas 2009 Food Log
This post is a note to myself about food for Christmas 2009.
Day 1: salt-baked roast chicken with garlic mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts. 3 trips to the grocery store. also, best drop biscuits.
Day 2: sliced-potato leftover chicken frittata with Gruyere. (almost a spanish Tortilla but I decided the tortilla wasn't going to be big enough, so added chicken and leftover potato.)
Day 3: shopping. aged gouda. lunch, potato with parsley, and giant raviolum, a Swabian specialty. Dead Like Me S01E01. Vinaigrette green salad involving cloud of parmesan.
Day 4: vegetarian dinner, "the Melissa": beet, zucchini, quinoa, sautéed almonds and garlic chips with a roasted red pepper, tomatoes, and mozzarella. Dead Like Me S01E02.
Day 5: 4-egg French omelette with leftovers from before. Long walk. Watched Avatar.
Day 6: breakfast: potato salad with apples. No-knead bread, baked salmon, potato and celery root puree. Bread with 75% hydration, 2% salt, 1/3 inch live yeast, 600g 1050 flour rose overnight and baked in Romertopf. Crumb not open enough, insufficient ovenspring. Will try lower temperature for longer time, deeper slashing, longer bench rest. Anise, Fennel, etc seeds requested for subsequent loaf.
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(comment on this) Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
shevek
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11:51p
It has been revealed to me that furriners may not get it.
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(9 comments | comment on this)
ladykalessia
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1:59p
So, I'm sitting in the airport at San Jose, waiting for my flight to board. Free wifi, sponsored by Google, and yet the only place there is to plug in laptops is in this perverse little nook by the bathrooms. All of us technology people are camped here on our butts with lappies plugged in.
I haven't flown since 2004, and am more than a little nervous. Forget meeting his parents, I'm scared to death about making it there intact. Woo.
Will try to remember to update when we get there.
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(4 comments | comment on this) Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
(2 comments | comment on this)
(comment on this)
shevek
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12:42a
Some minor things have happened.
I had an appointment with a chiropractor, which set me on an even keel and stopped me overbalancing and walking into door frames.
I trained for 4 hours tonight: 2 hours cycling and 2 fencing. I'm really pleased with myself, as I could only do 20 minutes a year and a half ago.
Standing on the weighing scales on one leg does not make me lighter, much as I might wish it.
I have clocked up a lot of air miles and expect to see Blighty sometime later next year.
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(6 comments | comment on this) Monday, December 21st, 2009
shevek
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11:11p
If the kosher shelves in Vancouver's supermarkets are to be believed, jews subsist on matzos and candle wax. The image of jews sitting around the table gnawing on yahrzeit candles is now hilariously stuck in my head. I'm just waiting for the "We've never had it so good!"
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(21 comments | comment on this) Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
ladykalessia
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10:23p
Long overdue, but I seem to be starting all of my entries like this.
I'm falling into an endless round of proofreading and editing and composing at work, with interesting work sponsored trips and recruiting activities, and quite honestly even doing Dickens as semi-halfassed as I feel it's going (read: not Fezziwigging it) it feels like it's taking up too much of my time. Time I could be spending on interesting projects at work. Time I could be fiddling with an Arduino or making wire-embedded lace. Or, um, writing. Yeah.
Looking to move, looking at how possible (or impossible) it would be to go out and buy a place, looking at the looming specter of co-habitation again... and I am... strangely peaceful about it all. I keep trimming my LJ to remove people I'm just not reading anymore, and it's not helping much.
And while life is stressful, it is also really really happy.
So there.
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(7 comments | comment on this)
ewhac
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1:56a
Ha! Finally!
I finally got LJ to display in the font I wanted.
It turns out it's a hopelessly subtle issue of syntax in the stylesheet. One of the standard font families is sans-serif. But if you want the generic sans-serif -- the one the user has configured in the browser preferences -- then you have to say sans-serif.
If instead you say "sans-serif" (i.e. surround it with quotes), it thinks you're specifying a proper name for a local font and tries to use that. Since, on Windows, there is no font named "sans-serif", it falls back to the browser's proportional default, which is usually Times New Roman.
I finally figured out how to get LJ to not surround the font name with quotes. So now it finally looks the way I want.
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(comment on this) Monday, December 14th, 2009
wohali
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1:59p
stunned at ms-plurk-ripoff
Originally published at An Atypical Life. Please leave any comments there. it’s no secret that i’m a big fan of plurk, despite my recent absence (social media exhaustion set in). i am especially happy because my plurkbuddy alvin woon moved back east to help promote the service, where it became the #1 microblogging service in China (prior to being firewalled).
not just because i want to see the little guy win, but also because it is just appalling that this occured:
Microsoft China stole Plurk’s UI and code and is pretending it’s their own service.
i could see a 2 bit startup doing this, or some non-multinational heavyweight that figured they could get away with it because they pay their lawyers more than the little guy. but this is just bald-faced theft.
i worked at a company many years ago who had their code stolen, and spent many years in the courts shutting down the competitor started by ex-employees who stole the code. from looking at the code involved, it was obvious it was a copy; in many places, error messages contained the same misspellings!
at the time, the ceo swore that he wouldn’t stop until he won back all of the business he lost to “the thieves,” and sued for damages for every cent lost. realizing they had a losing battle, the founders pled no contest, then the purchasing company settled out of court for about us$285mil all told. sadly, many of the customers they lost probably still use the purchasing company’s software instead; i think that company came out on top in the marketplace (for various other reasons). so my employer was vindicated, but didn’t manage to win back all of the business lost.
Plurk doesn’t have the resources to complete the lawsuit, but i hope that they find some other way to shut this down. it’s a different world now, 10-15 years later; maybe social media itself can stop this assault on the innovator. hopefully it will be before they, too, lose their loyal and active client base to a competitor.
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ewhac
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12:39a
Advice Sought -- Microsoft Visual Studio
Those of you who know me in even the most casual way may be shocked to hear me say: I want to do some programming in Windows.
One would think that one would simply go out and download a compiler and an SDK (a bit fat wad of compiler headers, link libraries, and documentation) -- or perhaps buy a CD-ROM containing same -- and you'd be completely set to develop any kind of Windows application.
You'd be wrong.
What's available is a hopelessly confusing mashup of tools to develop native applications, VisualBASIC applications, .NET virtual machine applications, Web applications (for IIS only, natch), database-driven applications and, if you're very nice and pay lots of money, Microsoft Office plugins. And, just to make it hard, all these tools are hidden underneath a cutesy Integrated Development Environment which passively-aggressively makes it as cumbersome as possible to figure out what's actually going on under the hood -- you know, the sorts of things a professional programmer would want to know.
Okay, fine, just give me the tools and docs to develop native C/C++ apps. "Oh, no no no," says Microsoft, twirling its moustache, "You have to pick one of our product packages." Packages? "Oh, yes, there's Visual Studio Express, Visual Studio Standard, Visual Studio Professional, Visual Studio Team System, and Visual Studio Grand Marquess with Truffles and Cherries."
After looking at the six-dimensional bullet chart of features, I think that Visual Studio Express may get the job done, since it comes with a C/C++ compiler and will compile native apps. "Quite so," says Microsoft whilst placing a postage stamp on a foreclosure notice, "provided you're only writing console apps -- you know, programs that run in a command window. If you want to develop full Windows GUI apps, then you'll need additional libraries which aren't necessarily included with Visual Studio Express."
Ah, so VS Express will only let me develop "toy" applications and, if I want to do anything more advanced, I should download and install the complete Windows SDK which, amazingly, is free. "Well, you could do that," says Microsoft after tying Nell to the sawmill. "But the SDK doesn't really integrate very well with the IDE. And there's still some link libraries which only ship with Visual Studio Standard or better."
Fine. I'll look at buying Visual Studio Standard. And then maybe I can get to improving this device driver. "Device driver!?" says Microsoft, blotting the blood spatters off its hat. "Heavens, no, that's not included with anything. You need to download and install the Driver Development Kit for that. And you may or may not need the DDK for each version of Windows you intend to support. Not to worry, however; they're all free downloads..."
*fume* And people wonder why I've avoided this clusterfuck for the last 25 years. Ever since the Visual Studio 6 days, I've been smacked in the face with this braindamage every time I've tried doing the slightest exploration of Windows development.
So: Can anyone with modest Windows development experience tell me what Visual Studio flavor to get and which addons to download if I want to:- Write native Windows applications and device drivers in C/C++,
- Debug said applications and device drivers,
- Not give a damn about "wizards" trying to write my code for me,
- Not give a damn about database, Web, VisualBASIC, or .NET development.
current mood: snarky
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(comment on this) Sunday, December 13th, 2009
(1 comment | comment on this) Saturday, December 12th, 2009
shevek
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5:45p
The rabble-raising trouble-making Dickens fair trip will be tomorrow, for anyone in the vicinity. I'll be the one causing the trouble.
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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