Author: cdwan

You know what they say about Borsch. “Beats soup!”

Seriously folks, I learned a little something today. It goes something like this: When you put hot liquids in the blender (like, for example, soup that you want to puree down to a smooth texture), it’s important to not fill the blender more than halfway. When you agitate the hot liquid, the air in the top of the blender will be heated and expand, forcing the lid off of said blender. This allows, in the worst case, scalding beet soup to splash you in the face.

Yup, took a batch of boiling beets to the right cheek today. Once I got done holding my face under the tub spigot, I came back to realize that my blender has a near-instant splash radius of well over two feet. That includes, walls, stove, floor, and several appliances (the toaster is drying as we speak).

The soup was delicious. Chilled it down, served with a little sour cream, some chives out of the garden, and bread and butter. Rustic veggie fare for summer eating.

A panda was practicing Panda style kung fu, with rooftop scrambling and river swimming through an urban area. I say, go panda!

The guy on NPR was describing the day: “Muggy,” he said. “Warm, wet, damp, foggy, heavy, hot, humid.” Then he started going to town: “Sultry, here in New England. Positively torrid. Swampy and overall uncomfortable.”

I love listening to any radio station where they will occasionally use words like “torrid.”

Is it a bad sign that I’m already listening to Tool, at 2:30pm on a Monday?

Usually this takes until at least Thursday or so.

Today is beet day. I’m making pickled beets. I picked as many beets as I could stand out of my garden, and got the rest of the required volume from the grocery store. Beets require serious love. Not only do you have funny bright red stains all over all your cutting boards and skin, plus the usual canning casualties of scalds and sweating all through a summer afternoon. In addition to these, peeling (skinning) the damn things is just a pain. I’m told that high level masters can sense those precious instants in the boil between when the beet skin loosens and the beet itself de-compensates. I have not yet achieved such mastery.

Easing my pain is the Dogfish head, 90 minute IPA. Easily the best IPA I’ve ever had. It’s pricy ($10 for a four pack), but they managed to balance an Imperial level of malt with a continual hopping over 90 minutes. It rocks. Go find some. Anyone who’s in the Delaware area is welcome to invite me for a weekend of hanging at their brewery.

Anyway, part of the pickled beet recipe includes tying up the top secret spice mix into a piece of “thin cloth.” You are then able to remove the top secret spice mix from the final product. Sadly, the “thin cloth” was a little too thin today, and it ruptured, spilling cloves and cinnamon sticks into the mix. My consumers can cope. If you bite down on a clove, smile and consider it a lucky gift from your chef.

We’re in that part of the recipe where we wait for things to return to a boil, so we can start the clock on the “process” which kills off bacteria. This is also the part where the cook says “Wow, I’m drenched in sweat. Where’s my beer?”

Just a quiet evening at home, reading the Harry Potter. I lost, so redmed has it first. I’m consoling myself by reading book 5 again. They go quick, the characters are lively, and the humor is British.

Went to a place called “Purgatory Chasm” with some friends today. Lots of rocks to climb around on. I even got to live my dream of hanging, one handed, from a rocky outcropping. Felt like Tom Cruise for a minute there, until I realized that I’m still not a Scientologist freako.

Breakfast was pleasant this morning. Made the standard fare: Eggs, hash browns, and scones. Anyone who wants this combination for breakfast, come visit. I also do pancakes, but I have to be in a good mood, otherwise they turn out tough and leathery.

Did the monster run again. 7 miles, plus a mile cool down. The plan was to run the full eight, but it didn’t happen. Seven is apparently my limit these days. That’s okay. Seven is a good number. When it cools down and I get used to running again, we’ll see what happens. This is still the best shape I’ve ever been in, in my entire life.

Guests tonight! Scott and his girlfriend (Gina?). Scott was in the Navy and drove submarines. When he got out after 10 years, he walked the Appalachian trail to clear his head. Now he’s taking weekends on Cape Cod with a girlfriend, and stopping off at my house on the way. Not a bad life.

Off to pick up breakfast ingredients.

My brain becomes less functional when it is very warm. It is very warm today.

I am working on beastly difficult code: A script which writes scripts which in turn, create scripts which (sometimes) write tiny little scripts of their own. I’m using constructs like:

if ( \$defs->_interface_standout ) {
    print SCRIPT \"open (STDOUT, \\\"> \\\$SCRATCH_DIR/$command.out\\\");\\n\";
} else {
    my \$standout = \$defs->_standout_file ;
    print SCRIPT \"open (STDOUT, \\\"> \\\$SCRATCH_DIR/\$standout\\\");\\n\";
}

Anyone who suggests that this would be simpler (a) in anything other than PERL (b) if I re-wrote it from scratch (c) if it were more object oriented will be poked in the ribs until bruising occurs the next time I see them.

I’ve been crowing a lot about the high points in my life. I figure I’ll go ahead and share a frustration:

I accidentally “upgraded” my laptop to OS X Server on Tuesday.

This was terrifyingly easy. Usually, Apples will tend to be irritatingly careful. The more lethal a particular action, the more times you have to confirm and re-confirm. “Really?” “Seriously?” “You’re sure about this?” In this case, I double clicked on the wrong installer (I wanted the server administrative tools, not Server itself). One quick root password later, and I was rebooting into the “Welcome to your brand new installation of OS X Server” screen.

Fortunately, I know my way around the OS, so I was able to convince it that I don’t really need a Server license. Doubly fortunate: It didn’t wipe my home directory along the way. I’ve still got all my stuff, my machine is just really confused about which software updates to apply. My plan is to “upgrade” it back to the normal version over the weekend. If I can get hold of a big enough firewire disk, I’ll wipe it and do a clean install. Hey, redmed isn’t using her iPod right now…that’s got space…

So now all kinds of dumb things are happening. My “Drafts” folder in the Mail application just said I had FOURTEEN draft messages, sitting unfinished. So I clicked on it to see what these were. It quietly corrected itself down to THREE. “oopsie.” My apps are crashing, things are stalling and unstable, and I’m generally fighting with my machine instead of mind-melding with it.

Bah.

Anyone know where the “-machines” argument went in MPICH 1.2.7? I was sort of using that, and now it appears to be gone.

How else am I supposed to loosely integrate with my queuing system? I used to write a file of the allowed nodes, and then pass it in to mpirun. What the heck am I supposed to do now?