Aquarionics

A recipe for disaster

Did you know that in america, people buy pasta by the box? How big is a box? We don’t know. Thus, when a recipe starts “take two boxes of rice”, we should know to leave the hell alone.

Hah, I decided, your strange american phrasings cannot harm me, my culinary genius is like a shield of steel.

Take one cup of rice. That is, take a small mug, put rice into it, pour it into boiling water, and boil it for 10 minutes. Drain.
Meanwhile, cook two chicken breasts (either properly or by bunging them in the nukeomatic for a few minutea)
Meanwhile, cook several slices of bacon. Cut into little pieces.

Get casserole dish. Add rice, add bacon and chicken (sliced into smaller pieces).
Take a can of cream of chicken soup. Add half a can of milk, stir.
Pour chicken/milk stuff over rice/bacon/chicken stuff.

Add herbs (Thyme, Basil, Whatever sounds good)

Top with cheese.

Cook at 190o^c for half an hour to 45 mins.

serve with greenery.

Some of you, my loyal readership, will have noticed that not only are we back in the land of the standard blue-specs/aq9 design for the whole site, but where once out-of-date Vice City stats dominated the sidebar, now the more educational “Reading List” prevails. Generally, I’m reading whatever’s on the top of that list, whereupon I’ll review it and something else can go in it’s place.

The reading pile is one of the most hotly contested arguments in Catrion Towers. You see, my natural reaction to having enjoyed a book is to try to get other people to read it. Lacking anyone else to pimp books at, I tend to give them to LoneCat to read. LoneCat’s ‘To Read’ pile consists of a small pile of books beside her bedside cabinet (Actually a box with a sari over it) which tends, when I do the recomendy thing, to get to the point where she can’t easily get into bed, at which point she gets upset. (Yes, me and my girlfriend sleep in separate beds in separate rooms. One day I’ll explain why).

Right now, then, I’m forbidden to add any more books to her ‘To Read’ pile. This is somewhat unfortunate, since I have quite a few books I’m still trying to get her to read (Not at all, I should emphatically point out, because I don’t have enough bookshelf space and storing large percentages of my library in her room saves me space. Oh no. That would be mean). This means that there are now four ‘To Read’ piles in our house. First there is mine, then the one beside LoneCat’s bed, then her bookshelf where she’s got all her books she wants to reread, and fourth is the growing pile in my room of books I’m going to put on her reading pile just as soon as she either a) lets me, or b) doesn’t pay sufficient attention.

Whichever comes first

So, today I was searching on my shelves and retreived “C for Dummies” parts 1 & 2, “Database Systems (A practical approach to application design, implementation and management)” and “An Introduction to System Analysis and Design” all for the first time since Uni.

What’s this, then? A new project to write an IMAP server that doesn’t suck? the fabled reimplimentation of Epistula as a Client/Server system written in C? or the fabled New Thing?

Actually, I just needed something to stand on to replace a lightbulb.

This isn’t to say I’m not doing one of the above, just that I need the lights on whilst doing it.

[ Amazon UK | US ]

Edward Rutherfurd is an author with a specialised genre all of his very own. He writes historical fiction which follows a place though the people who live there. ‘The Forest’ is a novel about the New Forest, as told though the stories of the families of Cola the Huntsman, The Prides, Furzeys, Grockletons, Puckles and so on from the founding of the Forest in William the Conquerors’s time, right down to the present day. From the killing of King Rufus (who died in the New Forest) though to the trial of Alice Lisle, down to the family politics of Jane Austin’s Bath, this is an epic tale which manages to wind together the past, present and future, pulling the reader slowly though the family trees and then swiftly though the fights, arguments and feuds of the families and the forest they have made their home.

If it has a fault, it is that the structure of the book (each chapter is a new generation, though not necessarily the generation after the one you last saw, and gaps of hundreds of years are not uncommon) lends itself to a slightly fractured plot-line, though Rutherfurd’s sense of narrative continuity means that the gaps between the stories are never too shear, or that a somewhat distanced narrative can occasionally make character motivations a mystery (Though this works both ways, it’s never obvious when a character’s mind is being opaqued deliberately), or a tendency towards slow movement as the setup for the new generation is explained.

The Forest is an excellent book by a master of narrative, but the structure might be a little strange and distracting to some readers. Nevertheless, it’s definitely worth reading especially if you have read, and enjoyed, previous works by the Author

Lack of entries? Lack of life. My entire life at the moment seems to consist of Wake up, Go to work, Code, Go home, Dinner, Sleep, Wake up. Go to work, fix computers, go home, dinner, sleep…) with variations like reversing dinner and going home and having dinner in London with ccooke & ruthi,

The last few days have been mostly spent putting my new work setup together, which consists of a box running Gentoo Linux (named aziraphale) running enlightenment (I like enlightenment, it Just Does, but I’ll be switching to gnome tomorrow, when it’s compiled…) and vmware workstation, which in turn is running XP Pro (as crowley), which is our development environment. The main reason for that is that I have a backup of crowley on aziraphale, so when (not, not if. When) the XP install dies a nasty and horrible death (Our software has a couple of bugs atm, meaning that occasionally it’ll install itself and not be able to uninstall, and since it’s an IE thing this is complicated) I can just restore the working config, and keep coding.

This would be bad if they were both on one monitor, but usable. Fortunatly I found a spare graphics card, so right now I’m typing into OpenOffice on the little monitor to the right, whilst IRC, Mozilla and everything else runs on the 17, this was suprisingly easy to set up once I groked the XFree config file sufficently. Only problem is that VMWare appears to dislike running on a second monitor in maximized mode (moving to the edge of the screen which should take me to the first monitor wraps the pointer to the other side of the small screen unless you move reaaaaaaally slowly. All other screen edges are hard barriers, incuding and this is the annoying bit the opposite side of the monitor). On top of all this, I’ve been told that at some point I’ll be developing a cross-platform version of our s/w, so that looks to be fun.

Slightly worried about the direction of the nomic, mostly worried about people flooding the game with some rules that make actually doing things difficult. Mostly, though, I’m annoyed that I’ve spent more time administrating the game than I have playing it, and that people are trying to drag the admin into the game, which is exactly the oposite of what I wanted to do. If I’d wanted imperial nomic (A variant where an emporer decides wheather rules pass on the fly) I’d have proposed it. Bah.

The writing fails to happen. Three hours a day on a train, sitting down, would you may have thought have been perfect for writing, and this would be true if I had something to write on and with that wasn’t manual, until I can get nemo (my ancient laptop) a battery (100, roughly, that I can’t justify) that might change.

Or a powerbook. That’d help too. (My CEO was given a powerbook. Given. By a friend. Nevermind, a couple of years and I’ll be a millionaire.

(I was voted person mostl likely to be a millionaire before he’s 25 at school. This appears to have been inaccurate, so far, but I live in hope)

(Acutally, I live in Reading, but it’s close)

Software. AqWiki will get a release as soon as I can be bothered to package it, Nomic Rules Manager will get a cool name and a release some point very soon, and Aquaintances will get a release when I work out why it isn’t catching the errir that is fulling my mail box with cron errors.

Epistula will now not get a packaged release, probably, until I’ve convinced myself I don’t want to completely rewrite it in perl. It’s live code is still online, though.