Unutterably Silly So what are you doing RIGHT NOW?

[dreams]

Originally Posted by montsnmags

That is the product of bad cooking rather than calamari itself.
Calamari should be nice and tender and have about as much resistance as a decently-cooked scallop. It goes tough very quickly if you overcook it.

As someone not usually fond of much seafood ....good calamari is one I quite like.

This is also the only seafood that I will eat... but only if I know it is cooked right..

Originally Posted by phenomshel

There used to be a small Italian restaurant in Abilene, Texas that served wonderful calamari. LOVE it.

The only place I have found that really knew how to cook it was an Italian restaurant in the little town I use to live in. The owner had retired and moved there... After 20 years he passed away and the new chefs just never did learn to cook the calamari like he did... It has usually been the small owner-owned Italian restaurants that came closest to cooking it to the right consistency.

Originally Posted by Crusader

Just finished unpacking the parcel containing the 2nd hand books I bought at an online auction.

I'm like a kid in a candy store. I love getting new books, even if they are 2nd hand.

Originally Posted by GraceKrispy

I finally made a goodreads page!!

Does that mean that I have to go finish the page I started a while back...?

[FlorenceArt]

Savoring being back home, even if it's only for a few hours. Have to get back to 's-Hertogenbosch (I just had to type that again ) on Sunday evening. Those two days went about as good as could be expected: a five hour drive, being introduced to a lot of people whose face, name and job I immediately forgot, a horrid night in a rather luxurious hotel, a nightmarish drive through the rain to Brussels (I wasn't driving), going crazy in the traffic while the GPS went crazy on its own (there the driver also went crazy and I had to take over), and miraculously getting on the train just as the departure signal was ringing.

I like calamari, even when it feels like it would bounce right back at you if you threw it at the wall. I like the texture

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by kazbates

Remember the Veg-O-Matic!! My mom used to have one and I loved chopping stuff for her. Now Williams Sonoma carries something very similar which, of course, I had to purchase. Now, my husband is the first in line to use it whenever I need something chopped.

"Veg-O-Matic" ? are you kidding me ? now you're just making stuff up. that sounds like a spoof commercial from the 60's.

Originally Posted by kazbates

Actually, that's a pretty good price for a mandoline. The really good ones can cost well over a $100 US. I purchased the OXO mandoline a while ago and love it. It's great for slicing onions and cabbage for coleslaw and especially good for slicing sweet potatoes for Paula Deen's Sweet Potato chips. Yum!

wow, i'll keep that in mind ! i admit, when i googled them, i checked on a price comparison site and while there were some around 15$ (probably without a guard...) a lot of them were much more, i think i saw one or two over 200$ !!

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Savoring being back home, even if it's only for a few hours. Have to get back to 's-Hertogenbosch (I just had to type that again ) on Sunday evening. Those two days went about as good as could be expected: a five hour drive, being introduced to a lot of people whose face, name and job I immediately forgot, a horrid night in a rather luxurious hotel, a nightmarish drive through the rain to Brussels (I wasn't driving), going crazy in the traffic while the GPS went crazy on its own (there the driver also went crazy and I had to take over), and miraculously getting on the train just as the departure signal was ringing.

ah, the adventures of working freelance... why was the luxurious hotel night horrid ?? i thought luxury is supposed to be pleasant !

[Crusader]

Originally Posted by dreams

Now there's the emoticon that more accurately reflects what I'm feeling!

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

why was the luxurious hotel night horrid ?? i thought luxury is supposed to be pleasant !

Because I didn't want to be in a hotel, I wanted to be home

[Patricia]

The cheapest mandolines just have a fixed blade. You can adjust the width of the slice with the expensive ones. And one definitely needs a guard unless one wants to slice one's fingers.

As for the vegematic, they're not a myth, though I prefer a very sharp knife, preferably Japanese. It's easier to clean, in my opinion.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

I was saying anything having to do with object oriented programming is highly machine inefficient.

Unless you are in the embedded space, you mostly don't care. Hardware is cheap. Programmer time is expensive. You want modular code that can be reused to avoid reinventing the wheel every time. Inefficient? Throw more hardware at it...

I've spent a week trying to install Windows 2000 on an Acer Aspire Revo, and gave up. I'm afraid that made me cranky...Sorry.

What were the roadblocks?
______
Dennis

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Because I didn't want to be in a hotel, I wanted to be home

ah, of course. not even really excessive luxury can hold up then.

Originally Posted by Patricia

The cheapest mandolines just have a fixed blade. You can adjust the width of the slice with the expensive ones. And one definitely needs a guard unless one wants to slice one's fingers.

As for the vegematic, they're not a myth, though I prefer a very sharp knife, preferably Japanese. It's easier to clean, in my opinion.

i am starting to have a very good list of criteria for choosing the perfect mandoline. thanks patricia.

(i still don't believe the Veg-O-Matic is real though. )

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Unless you are in the embedded space, you mostly don't care. Hardware is cheap. Programmer time is expensive. You want modular code that can be reused to avoid reinventing the wheel every time. Inefficient? Throw more hardware at it...

Hey, your not Jeff Atwood are you?

BOb

[Greg Anos]

I guess this should goes in the vent and rant thread, but we are here....

(And please, please, don't think I'm trolling. I'm not. Just frustrated.)

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Unless you are in the embedded space, you mostly don't care. Hardware is cheap. Programmer time is expensive. You want modular code that can be reused to avoid reinventing the wheel every time. Inefficient? Throw more hardware at it...

Dennis, I'm at the end of 20+ years of thinking like that. I have a machine as powerful as a 1980 CRAY I supercomputer, doing the type of tasks I was doing 20 years ago, on a machine 100 times faster than what I had 20 years ago, and yet it still seems to run no faster... Why, because the answer was always, too slow?, throw some more hardware at it. And quick, let's add some more features that less that 1% of the users will use so we can sell a new release. (But it'll run too slow! No problem, throw some more hardware at it. Repeat ad infinitum.) And it's an easy pattern, as the people writing the programs aren't paying for the hardware!

I want to get off this ridiculous treadmill...But I want to keep what I've got already, circa 2002-3. And I can't. Instead I have to keep feeding the troll. And swapping new bugs for the old ones.

(A sidebar. I took a core Java course several months ago. The instructor talked about garbage collection. I asked for more detail. Yep, the same garbage collection from Basic, circa 1978. Java was created in 1995. The problem of garbage collection had been solved in the dinosaur world by 1975. Twenty years later, Sun was creating a new language with the same problems that had been solved 20 years ago. I know, I know...throw some more hardware at it.)

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

What were the roadblocks?
______
Dennis

They fell into two categories, hardware interface and and drivers. And they stepped on each other.

First, hardware - these nettops don't have a built in optical drive. So I had a USB 2.0 external optical drive. Some times the BIOS would find it, most times not. I would later find out that if you used the external power supply that the optical drive came with, the nettop couldn't find the optical drive via usb 2.0. However, it you used a double USB 2.0 plug for power and connection, the BIOS would then find it. That was not obvious, and took me days to figure out.

The drive were SATA. OK, not in the WIN 2000 Pro SP2. So I downloaded the NVIDIA drivers from ACER. Slipstreamed them into a Legit copy of 2000 pro. Finally got the slipstream copy to load. Died on the boot. Of course I shouldn't be surprised, they were XP drivers. (actually I should be surprised, as most XP drivers will work in 2000.) Died on the Ethernet drivers. Well, I wasn't using Ethernet anyway, drop them out of the slipstream. Next pass, installed and died on the boot again, with an NTOSKRNL problem. Hey, if the drivers can no longer use the 2000 kernel, just prop the feet up and throw the disc in the fire...( And remember each pass tries to format the hard drive. Win 2000 won't load on a system with a windows defined partition on it. So after each fail, you have to to de-partition the OS hard drive. On the Revo, that means you have to completely field strip the machine, as the brilliant engineers put the screws to the hard drive on the other side of the motherboard from all the other screw holding the machine together. So I was continually taking apart and putting back together the machine. Over and over...)

Just for fun, I then tried the same procedure with my copy of XP PRO SP2. Died over and over again with a 0x000007b on the initial OS load. I didn't bother to try upgrading to SP3...

I have stated before that I consider software to be immortal, as long as you can get hardware to run it. Windows 2000 was the last immortal version of Windows. Everything since then has to be activated to keep running. Whenever Microsoft decides to stop activating a piece of software, it then becomes a toaster for any future use on a replacement machine...

And for those who say Linux is the answer, it has it's own set of problem...


Sorry Dennis, but you asked....

(Side joke. It took me a long time to key the response. So I made a copy before trying to post. The post procedure had timed out and when I re-logged on, it looped, saying go back a screen, then it would reprocess the logon and give me the identical message. I had to leave MR totally and get back in to post...RSE)

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

ah, of course. not even really excessive luxury can hold up then.


i am starting to have a very good list of criteria for choosing the perfect mandoline. thanks patricia.

(i still don't believe the Veg-O-Matic is real though. )

They were really really real. I have seen one. Ralph Sir Edward. (Of course, I was a little tyke at the time....)

[vivaldirules]

Okay, I'm sitting here in front of my brand new Vista PC at work (it replaces my Win 2000 one I was given many moons ago). It still takes a cup of coffee or two to boot up and one to shut down. It still hangs. It still has "issues". I still hate it. With the processor in it, the calculations I used to do overnight twenty years ago this month should take a blink of an eye. I hate IT.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

Okay, I'm sitting here in front of my brand new Vista PC at work (it replaces my Win 2000 one I was given many moons ago). It still takes a cup of coffee or two to boot up and one to shut down. It still hangs. It still has "issues". I still hate it. With the processor in it, the calculations I used to do overnight twenty years ago this month should take a blink of an eye. I hate IT.

Thank you, VR. Three :scritches: and a pound of bacon....

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

(i still don't believe the Veg-O-Matic is real though. )

It is: http://www.walmart.com/catalog/produ...ct_id=10575906

"The Ronco Veg-O-Matic! It rices! It slices! It dices!

But wait! There's more! If you act now, we'll send you, absolutely free..."

There's about about the ad pitches that became legendary, too: http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/...02/june/ronco/
______
Dennis

[Greg Anos]

The computer issues are why there haven't been very many Red posts...I'll get back. I'll really, really, work on it....(Hmmm... How can I work in a Ronco Veg-o-matic? Quite a two Pearl problem...)