Other: Adventures in Cooking

When pouring hot polenta, try not to cover one of the handles!

As I mentioned previously, I've recently started cooking stuff from scratch. Here are some things I've learned thus far:

• When making rice pudding, make sure you actually have enough milk before cooking the rice, because you probably don't know how much 3 cups is supposed to weigh when you pick up the carton. Otherwise you end up with rice clumps, which, while edible, just aren't as satisfying.
• If you're going to try flipping your frittata onto a plate and inverting back into the frying pan, make sure your plate is bigger than the pan first.
• If you accidentally spill some of your unset frittata eggs on the burner when flipping because your plate is smaller than your frying pan, make sure you clean it up before the next time you cook with that burner or you'll wonder why your cooking polenta smells like burning eggs.
• Polenta takes a lot of stirring and is not for the lazy. Alternate hands for even muscle workout.
• Make sure Dipity doesn't make one of her excursions on the kitchen counter when you've left a bunch of chopped tomatoes on the cutting board up there.

At least I can say that I haven't set fire to anything, burned anything (except for some toast I was using to try to make bread crumbs that didn't get toasted enough the first go-round), or made anything totally inedible.

Whiteboard Jungle: Printer Angst

Whiteboard Jungle: What I Did At Work Today

Poor little printer...

And that was BEFORE I drank the beer at the company Cinco de Mayo party.

News: Just... WTF

Just... speechless.

• cnn.com headline: "Neighbor: Times Square suspect 'didn't like sunlight'" This is the most... what, informative? Insightful? Interesting? No, I believe the word is "idiotic" quote to put up about the guy. Seriously, WTF?
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  Aw, man, and I thought I was figuring out this whole cooking thing, and now they throw that at me! WTF!
• What? You can't copyright the idea of putting vegetables in kids' food? There goes my get-rich-quick scheme. WTF?
• 
  
  Well, I guess that's one way to cut down on people needlessly printing out emails. Make them scared of causing toner critical mass. WTF?
• The crochet WTF of the week. Trust me, don't look at it on a full stomach.
• I can't read German, but I'm wondering if the title of this magazine translates to "Computers, Programmers, and the Swinging Lifestyle." WTF?
• And the dumbass of the week: The Florida state senator caught looking at naughty photos on his laptop on the Senate floor. I realize that whole job thing, the one which you went out of your way to get by running for election, is boring, but seriously, WTF?

And the lolcat of the week:

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

News: DIY Week!

This week's sampling focuses on you! Now get off yer butt!

First, some links to awesome images you MUST SEE (but I don't want to hotlink or copy the images):

• READ THIS: Nerds, Geeks, and Dorks explained!
• A public transportation rider's group in Toronto has made these amazing posters!

DIY! (via Lifehacker)

• Here's what I'm going to be doing this coming week at work! Making a pencil-and-rubber-band crossbow! Because the week after that will be my first week on-call and I need to be prepared!
• My late tri-colors Pandora and Clio would have loved these hacked bookcases, as they couldn't resist a place to put their fuzzy butt on display (Pandora) or a vertical structure to climb (Clio). But Spoon is, well, lazy, and Dipity will just have to make do for now with the current landscape, because I don't have enough bookshelves for my books at the moment, let alone for cats.
• I like this idea for keeping your passwords safe in your pocket but virtually uncrackable.
• I've actually started cooking a little, and I'm eying this recipe for pop-tarts.

Random ebilness:

• This graph summarizes how much time Americans spend in or waiting for elevators. So, where's the accompanying graph showing how much time they'd spend in stairwells instead?
• Another neat illustration from the Infrastructurist showing total and per capita gas consumption by state.
• We Have Met The Enemy and He Is PowerPoint. (However, the guy who made the what-was-scheduled-to-be-1-hour-but-turned-into-90+-minutes-where-I-don't-know-what-the-plus-is-because-that's-when-I-left-so-I-could-bang-my-head-against-the-wall presentation solely out of traversing the source code repository in his web browser actually made me long for useless PowerPoint slides this week...)
• Over at EFF, the funny-'cause-it's-true article on Facebook's "Evil Interfaces". (For those of you who don't know what EFF is, it's not only not ebil, it's the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you hate the digital rights management that breaks your DVD or MP3 players, pointless web censorship, or the fact that your ISP wants to throttle your completely legal bittorrent download of your favorite Linux distribution, you should be nice to them.)
• In a case of the pot calling the kettle black, Steve "You're Not Going To Run Anything On Your iPhone That I Don't Want You To" Jobs attacked Adobe's Flash because it's a closed, proprietary system.