Need Spring Now

I seriously am sick of the cold. I'm no lover of heat or anything, but I need Spring to happen...NOW!

Not exactly winter doldrums going on, but I do have a hard time finding energy for stuff right now. My body is ready for Spring, dammit. Besides, I'm ready to start working on the house...and that's hard to do when I can't open windows to remove paint fumes, et cetera.

Smacky has been sick since Thursday...which sucks, both for her and for me. She's spent the entire weekend wrapped in blankets and drinking tea. I spent Friday out with Nemo, Alan, and Anita. Fun times, despite the wife being ill. We went to the Louisville Orchestra's performance of Beethoven's 9th. While not perfect, it was impressive. The soprano soloist was unbelievable. Add to that getting to spend time with Alan and Anita, and my Friday was great.

Work has been hectic lately. I have a lot of smallish projects, most of them inter-twined with my larger projects, and none of them are complete, mostly because of red-tape/delays. Which leaves me with more and more open work and no ability to close them out. Grrrr. But at least all my co-workers are great and I don't hate life after leaving there.

Today was Doing-The-Taxes Day, and it sucked as much as I thought it would. The reduced salary meant less of a refund (I left my witholdings the same after buying our house since it means a yearly influx of money I can apply in bulk to pay off debt). But we might still be 100% out of debt (except for the mortgage) after the refund. I'll know more in a few days of time spent navigating through Turbo Tax. Blah. It shouldn't be so hard...

V For Very-Good

Smacky and I met Nemo at the theater to see V For Vendetta. It was an excellent movie, and I highly recommend others see it. If it doesn't have you feeling disturbed and uncomfortable about the state of the world... Yeesh. But an excellent film.

A few choice quotes from the evening:

Dude! You are SUCH a nerd. That is disgusting! Get that off the table!

And how many pairs of wet teeth do you have in your pocket?

A yoga competition?! Are you insane?

Nemo really needs a sane woman. Badly...

Biryani Two

Thursday's 3RD was tasty. The biryani recipe was just as tasty as the test-run a week prior. It took a lot less time to prepare this time. I made a half batch since we weren't expecting many people. Damn fine food.

The only bad thing was my order for the first edition asian cookbook got cancelled. Apparently the bookseller did not have it on the shelf after all. Damn. Have to start looking again, I guess.

Biryani Test Run

So Thursday, we had a trial run of the biryani recipe I had researched for this month's 3RD. I spent hours scouring the net, looking at various biryani recipes, and settling on two that sounded closest to how I like my biryani. I then compared the ingredients and created a full list of ingredients from between the two. After that, I pretty much used one's cooking regimen with only minor tweaks from the other. In the end, a full-sized sheet of cooking instructions. Wow.

The dish took about 4 hours to prepare. It yielded about 8-12 servings, depending on serving size. And it was nearly perfect. About the only thing not right was it could use a little more lamb, and a little more saffron. Other than that, the taste was spot on, the consistency was spot on, and it was amazingly good.

Nemo and KD came over to partake of the experiment...and both left pleasantly stuffed and well-pleased.

Additionally, Nemo had brought over his mother's asian cookbook. Thirty years old, it had served his family quite well, and thanks to their family and travels, the dishes for Sri Lanka and India and a few others had been authenticated. There was even a hand-written family recipe for pickled pineapple. It all looks delicious. Nemo's maternal unit had offered to let me borrow it to copy out of, learn from, et cetera. When looking at the amazing wealth of information, and the wonderful 30 year old retro quality of the book, I quickly hopped online the next day to look for a copy.

Luckily, I found the same first-edition copy, in good condition, for a not unobtainable price. So I ordered it right away. As soon as I have my copy, I can go through their's page by page and transcribe their notes, and return the book quicker than I could have otherwise. Thank you to Nemo and his mother! And thank you, Internet, for helping me find this precious tome!

A Pocket Full Of Nerdry

So I wasted a bit of time writing a piece of software for my wife. Nothing spectacular, mind, just a little something she wanted. It's rather silly, but it is an electronic double slide-rule for stitch calculations in knitting.

Why? Because Smacky has become a big knitter in the last year or two, and she has had this little paper slide-rule which helps convert knitting patterns using different needle sizes, larger size in inches, et cetera.

So I figured out the (very simple) math involved with the slide-rule, and began to write code. Luckily I have a great RAD tool for Palm, which helped me create a little Palm program for Smacky that not only does the slide-rule calcs, but does two of them at the same time, so you can convert with both source and target on the same screen. Nifty.

I finished the prototype in an hour or two the first night, and was pretty happy with the results. Initial testing seemed to be fine, but occasionally I would be off by one with my calculations. Grr. Why?

Because of rounding. Duh. Well, no problem, I'll just round the result. What? No round() function?! Crap. Well that sucks. I actually was a bit upset with Orbforms for a bit, since it seems like you should always have a round() function. Then it hit me: add one-half and then cast to an integer.

Another "duh" moment. Why didn't I think of that right away? I quickly typed it in and of course my numbers were correct because of it. For those non-geek readers, "casting to an integer" is basically forcing a conversion from the number with fractions to a number without a fraction. So, by "casting to an integer" I can force 9.4523 to become 9. By adding a half, I get the rounding effect, since anything X.5 and up will become the next highest number, while anything under X.5 stays the same number. So 9.4523 becomes 9.9523 and casts to 9. Whereas 9.5423 becomes 10.0423 and casts to 10. Neat.

Geeky crap like that is fun. For me at least.