The Food tasting meme

1. Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2. Bold all the items you.ve eaten.
3. Cross out any items that you would never consider eating (or eating again)
4. Optional extra: Post a comment http://www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

To make the filling out of this form and generating the HTML for it a bit easier, reddywhp has played around with some PHP. Go to http://reddywhip.org/lj/foods/ and fill it out there. After filling it out, you will be given the code to copy and paste into your blog.

Livejournal users, remember to use your LJ-Cuts!

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth $120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frog’s Legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

about:mozilla is a blog and weekly newsletter that focuses on the major news items related to the Mozilla Project. These news items can really be about any aspect of the Project, ranging from development news and schedules through marketing and community events. For an idea of what sort of news we cover, just check out the blog or the past issues.

We’re looking for help. Do you follow or are you involved in a particular part of the Mozilla Project? Do you think there’s news and information about that part of the Project that deserves to be included in the about:mozilla blog and newsletter? If so, please send a note to about-mozilla at mozilla.com. Ideally you will include a snappy headline, a short version of the story you’re submitting (a few sentences is sufficient, really — the newsletter needs to be short and to the point), and at least one link where readers can get more information.

Just added new fiddly bit to the weblog. Who knew that WordPress had so many kickass plugins now? Not me, that’s who!

Revising the cache clearer. Whee…grr. Grr, argh. nn

I stopped buying pre-made salad dressings a long, long time ago because a) they’d get used once then end up rotting in the back of the fridge because they’re not really very good, b) it’s ridiculously easy to make your own from scratch, and c) making your own is about 1000x cheaper than buying pre-made.

I’ve established a base template for vinaigrette dressings which has held up pretty well through on-going tests. It is:

• 1/2 c oil (olive oil, generally)
• 1/3 c vinegar/sour (vinegar(s) + citrus juices, etc.)
• 1 finely minced clove of garlic (not optional, unless you really hate garlic (weirdo))
• 1 finely minced small shallot (not really optional, but you can substitute a couple of tablespoons of red onion if you must)
• 1/2 tsp sweet (sugar, honey, maple syrup, whatever)
• 1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper
• Pinch salt to taste

Put it all in a mason jar, make sure the lid is nice and tight, then shake like hell. A lot. Make it about an hour or so before you need it if you can, but that’s optional. Shake it again later. Don’t bother making enough for leftovers — it doesn’t store well and making it fresh is easy and awesome.

Now, I am a crazy vinegar-loving person, so you may want to ratchet the vinegar/sour back a bit. Starting with this basic template (which takes about 10 mins to make once you master the shallot/garlic mincing process) you can add whatever extras you want — fresh chopped herbs, grated cheeses, mustards, chopped capers, minced citrus zest, etc. Whatever.

The most recent was: olive oil, white wine vinegar, and lime zest (quite a lot…it was really tasty). Tonight’s is: olive oil, white wine vinegar, and about 1/3c finely grated parmasean cheese. Yum.

Update: If you’re going to use balsamic vinegar, don’t do the whole 1/3-1/2c with it. Cut that with something else. More than a few tablespoons of balsamic is a) a waste of balsamic, and b) going to be profoundly overpowering. Use the medium-good stuff, not the super-good stuff. Save the good stuff for drizzling over strawberries.

Our garden has some daisies in it. Many, in fact.

iPhone pic of the sky while I was out walking and rocking to some Matt Good earlier. No rain today for the first time in, literally, weeks.

As far as I can tell, from my three-or-four day experiment, Feedburner is just totally broken. At very least, the WP plugin doesn’t work, or something. Alas. The mystery of my subscriber numbers and “reach” shall remain just that. Should be back to normal feeds now, please let me know if anything is broken (if you can read this, but if you read via feeds you probably won’t see this if it’s busted). Ah teknology.

Cool article over on Ars Technica: Prof tweets about course, ends up moving whole class online.

So, there’s a Wordpress app for the iPhone which, after giving me a hard time with my password, seems to be working quite well. Still not used to the iPhone keyboard - I’m still one-fimger typing here - but it’s better than nothing I suppose. I wonder if I can insert a picture..

Well let’s post this and see.

My entire photoprocessing workflow is now wholly contained in Lightroom 2 because of Jeffrey Friedl’s Export to Flickr plugin. And Lightroom does crazy smart things like stashes images in a temp directory for uploading then automatically deletes the images afterwards so you’re not gumming up your harddrive with unnecessary images that you’ll probably never use again.

I realized recently that I have absolutely no idea how many people read this blog. I’m curious, however, so I’m going to try out Feedburner for a while, just to see if it tells me anything useful or interesting. Ok. If you have any problems with my feeds for whatever reason, please let me know. I don’t want to break anything.

I spend a whole lot of time on my computer since it lives right in the center of both work and play for me. I also tend to spend quite a bit of time messing around with new software, always keeping an eye out for applications that will make my life easier, more productive, or just more fun. Recently I’ve started using a bunch of new stuff that’s all pretty good.

TweetDeck

At first I didn’t like TweetDeck at all, but they seem to be fixing the bugs and working to make it feel a little less alien. The first version I tried didn’t even have a proper titlebar, so it just felt completely wrong. It’s still pretty odd and takes some getting used to, but it is by far the best Twitter client I’ve tried yet.

Together

Together is sort of a digital scrapbook application. I use it to gather and track stories to be included in the about:mozilla weblog and newsletter, for the most part, but also use it to hang on to files and webpages I want to read later, compile sources for another project I’m working on, and so forth. It’s a nice, handy, unobtrusive utility that’s easy to use and works quite well.

MarsEdit 2

A growing part of my job involves writing posts for a number of weblogs. MarsEdit is a very straightforward blogging tool that lets me manage posts for multiple blogs in a simple UI that never gets in my way. It has all the features I need and nothing extraneous or distracting. It’s hard to ask for more in writing tool you use every day.

Adobe Lightroom 2

I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with the original Lightroom, so I’m not really sure what’s new or changed in LR2, but I’ve been playing with it for a few days and really like it. Lightroom simplifies and streamlines the work that goes into processing digital photos from RAW into a final version for web or print. It doesn’t do everything Photoshop does, of course, but for me it covers about 95% of anything I want to do to my images before publishing or printing. I’m still just learning how to use the software, but I can already process pictures 3-4x faster than I could in Photoshop, and I expect that will only get better as I become more familiar with the software and some of it’s automation features.

The pricetag on Lightroom 2 is a wince-inducing $300 USD, but I think it’s worth it, and I’ll be buying this one as soon as my 30 day demo is up. If you’d like to see some of the pictures I’ve processed with it, I have a set up on Flickr.

Things

Things is basically a fancified To-Do List manager. It has the features you need if you want to go all GTD, but also lets you use a more simple system if you want. I use a semi-GTD system in that I have a list of projects in Things, and have those projects broken down into the various actions needed to get them to completion. For those projects that repeat (ie: the about:mozilla newsletter), I have a set of scheduled tasks I have to do every week or month or whatever.

Each morning I go through the full list, flag the items I want to get done today (there’s a handy “Today” star, which I think most GTD systems lack but I can’t live without) and then I just go ahead and do those things. Ta dah.

There’s also a Things for the iPhone/iPod Touch which I will eventually buy when it will sync with my desktop Things. Until then, it’s really not useful to me since there’s no way I’m going to manually manage two lists. They’re working on it, it’s just not ready yet.

Is there other Mac software out there you think I’d like? Leave a note in the comments.