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Monday, May 19th, 2008
All I have at this point is the background; I think a good, science-fictiony story could be written with this background but I don't have characters or events yet. A method of memory-enhancement has been developed, I think a genetic-modification method, that leads to a world in which people do not forget anything. However people want to forget a lot of their painful and traumatic memories. So: a method of memory transfer has been developed (note the passive voice: this story is not about these developments, they have already happened in the past), which can move memories between hosts. The memories cannot be deleted -- what is a memory without a host? A new profession springs up of "bearer of unwanted memories". Practitioners are reviled, kind of similar to how our society looks at prostitutes. People with no other way of making money sell their services at memory-transfer labs. The affluent visit these dens of ill repute to rid themselves of memories of rape, shame, abuse, criminality. The story is about one of these memory hosts and how he gets through the day with all the ghosts in his head.
posted morning of May 19th, 2008: 2 responses
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Our irises are blossoming this year! Last year the plants grew but produced no flowers. The bulbsrhizomes are from The Presby Memorial Iris Gardens in Montclair, where you can get a mixed grab bag during bloom season for cheap.
posted morning of May 19th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, May 9th, 2008
You want to know what is a really excellent pasta? Foglio d'Autunno, is what. I bought a bag this evening to go with the dinner I was making for Ellen, and man -- I don't know if I have ever tasted a more pleasant pasta. It's really surprising, since noodles are usually made in regular shapes; these are like little irregular lumps of pasta in different colors. I recommend it. This recipe was inspired by A White Bear's Cauliflower Pasta Sauce. (For reasons too complicated to explain in this short context, you can log in to AWB's recipe site using as a password, the initial letters of the phrase "Why Must You Be Such A Little Bitch?") I was scanning through the wiki this afternoon looking for a dinner recipe; my eyes kept coming back to that one. Thanks AWB for reminding me of the existence of asiago cheese, which I had somehow forgotten about. Modified Cauliflower Pasta Sauce- one red onion
- garlic
- one head of cauliflower
- a bit of spinach
- grated cheese, asiago or romano
Sauté the onion, garlic and cauliflower in olive oil for a good long time, about half an hour. It's ready when the the cauliflower gets tender and pleasant to bite into. At this point you should put pasta into the water that you have been bringing to a boil.Add a few handfuls of cheese and the spinach leaves to the pan. As the cheese starts to burn, pour some liquid over it and stir well. (AWB used broth, I used white wine.) Turn the heat down to a simmer. When the noodles are ready, toss everything together in a bowl and serve.
It's a good dinner, and pretty easy to put together. I was worried when the cheese started burning, that I had done something wrong; but it turns into a really nice brown sauce in the wine.
posted evening of May 9th, 2008: Respond
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Question about timeouts on select(): if anyone has ideas about this, please let me know in comments. Obviously select() is not a real-time operation; if you pass in a 1-second timeout, you cannot assume that you will get to run again in one second, since the operating system is allotting time to all the processes on the machine: in an extremely busy environment, it could be several seconds before you get the processor back. But I'm wondering whether the timeout is 1 second of real time, or 1 second of execution time -- in the very busy environment where your process does not get another time slice for more than a second, would select() continue to wait on the files you passed in until it had waited for a second? Or would it return immediately? (select() as it is used in this post should be read to mean "select() and poll()," since I'm assuming both API's behave the same in this regard. Who knows, maybe they don't! But that seems unlikely to me.)
posted afternoon of May 9th, 2008: 2 responses
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Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Ellen came up with a very tasty recipe this evening: One Pot Wonder: Baked Monkfish and Italian Sausage
adapted from Real Simple. Serves 3.
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 3 sausages, cut into small chunks
- 1 lb. Yukon gold potatoes, sliced thin
- 1 leek, white and light green parts only, halved lengthwise, rinsed, and thinly sliced into half-moons
 - ½ cup low-salt chicken broth
- pinch of crumbled saffron threads
- kosher salt
- black pepper
- ¾ lb. monkfish fillet
- chopped parsley for garnish
Heat oven to 400° F.
Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. Add the sausage and brown on both sides. Add the potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Add the leeks, broth, saffron, pinch of salt, a couple of grinds of pepper. Bring to a boil.
Rinse the monkfish, pat dry, season with salt and pepper. Place on top of potatoes and drizzle with 1 tablespoon olive oil. Transfer pan to oven and bake until the fish is cooked through, about 15-20 minutes. If potatoes are not ready, take out fish and wrap in foil, until the rest is done. Serve with parsley on top.
The parsley (along with a little bit of oregano) was the first use our new herb garden has seen.
posted evening of May 8th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
So last night I was maintaining code for a program which loaded a helper program for handling data files. Before it executed the helper program it would check the sum of the binary, I think because certain instances of the helper needed special handling; if the sum was not on a list of recognized values, the program would log an error and exit. Unfortunately the helper program was not stable and was being recompiled frequently; every time this happened I needed to edit the list of recognized sums, which was hard-coded into the main program, and recompile the main program. I was embarrassed about such a stupid bit of code being in the program so I was editing, compiling, and distributing the main program without mentioning it to anybody. What a stressful dream that was! (Sort of ties everything together in a way, that I woke up humming Bessie Smith's "Gimme Pigfoot", which was in Gertrude Sturdley's post this week and which I was working on a fiddle version of last night.)
posted morning of May 7th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, May second, 2008
I said yesterday that I wanted to reminisce some about starting the blog. Well: I think I've written most of this before, but here goes. In 1999 or thereabouts, I decided I wanted to have a website, and that it should consist of a notes about what books I am currently reading. I cajoled my then-employers to give me some space on their server, I bought a domain name from Network Solutions, I wrote a couple of pages. The site went live the same evening Ellen's writing group held a reading of their work at Cornelia Street Café; we announced the site's launch, fun. Over the next couple of years I wrote sporadically for the site; occasionally came up with some really interesting pages. (My notes on reading Faulkner's The Hamlet are one of the most popular pages in all of READIN -- nearly every day brings a couple of Google searches for "The Hamlet by Faulkner", which I guess must not have a lot written about it on the web. It is probably my favorite Faulkner book, largely because the process of writing notes on it went so well.) The technology supporting READIN at this point was Notepad to compose posts and a Visual Basic™ program to compile them into nicely formatted HTML. In 2002 I started noticing blogs (I think the first one I read was Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World, which I found while searching for an online publisher of his comic), and getting interested. I didn't realize for a while that blogging was what I wanted to do -- I was hardly maintaining READIN at all anymore, and I didn't make the connection between my web site and this new technology. (I'm slow that way.) But after about a year of reading blogs I decided to give it a try, and in the space of about a week hacked together an ASP script to render pages. And this journal was born. And, well, this is one of the main things I do for fun nowadays. It gets more and more interesting as I learn new ways I can use the technology. Hope to keep it going for a long time.
posted evening of May second, 2008: 3 responses
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You want to know what is a really nice feeling? Thinking of a recipe while you're at work, for which you have a couple but not all of the ingredients; coming home, taking a walk to the (new! good!) market in town;* finding exactly the ingredients you were thinking about; bringing them home and making dinner and having it come out just like you had planned. Shrimp and scallops, with saffron cous-cous(to serve 2)
- ½ lb. small shrimp
- a few scallops
- 1 head basil
- about ½ lb. snow peas
- 1 can baby corn
- 1 cup dry cous-cous
- 4 cloves garlic
- a pinch saffron
Prepare all ingredients beforehand as this is a quick dish to cook: wash the peas and basil, drain the corn, chop the garlic. Peel and vein the shrimp.Heat 1 cup water in a small saucepan, with a bit of butter, about half the garlic, and ½ tsp. salt. Heat about a Tbsp. canola oil in a wok over high flame. Stir-fry garlic, shrimp and scallops with a pinch of salt until shrimp turns pink, about 2-3 min. As water comes to a boil, remove from heat and stir in cous-cous and saffron. (I was going to put a little nutmeg in, but I forgot.) Cover pan. Add snow peas, basil, and corn to wok and stir until everything is hot and wilted, a couple of minutes. Toss cous-cous with a fork. Serve immediately. Boy, this is tasty.
For dessert we had fruit salad with chocolate and crème fraiche, which is not really worth writing out as a recipe because it's pretty intuitive. I recommend such a dessert highly.
 * South Orange has a market! This is something new. It is Eden Gourmet. They have close to everything I want in a market. Prices are high but what can you do -- they are competitive with Whole Foods, the other grocery option around here; their produce looks to be better and cheaper than Whole Foods. Their grocery selection is absolutely better and wider than Whole Foods; on items that both carry I think the prices are roughly similar.
posted evening of May second, 2008: Respond
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 I like it.
posted evening of May second, 2008: Respond
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This week I have been making an effort to add illustrations to my posts and to my sidebar links. I'm pretty happy with how it's looking and intend to keep doing that -- it seems to make the page a lot more visually engaging. Also thinking of trying to find a graphic that would fit nicely in the upper right-hand corner of the page, where there is a lot of empty space.* Somewhat related, I've been doing a lot of work on the interface for adding new posts and editing posts, so that I'm able to see how the post will render as I'm adding it. Would like to do something similar for adding/editing the daily "Of interest:" links, but that is going to be a bit more involved.
 *Update: Found one! How do you like it?
posted evening of May second, 2008: Respond
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