Doug's Sounding Board

Mo was nice enough to take me to see Alpha Dog just so we could watch Justin Timberlake in his first movie. The movie itself was entertaining and Justin Timberlake is decent on the screen but he comes across too nice to be a gangster. You leave the movie wishing you could hang out with him. I think the right role is out there for him.

I just finished reading To Infinity and Beyond – A Cultural History of the Infinite by my favorite math historian, Eli Maor. You don’t need a strong math background to enjoy the book, but it probably helps. It covers the various struggles people have had over time with the infinite and how they approached it, starting with the greeks and moving up to current day (though astronomy of the last 20 years makes it look a little dated). I think it provides a good overview of infinity (hehe) and I’m sure there is something new for just about anyone who reads it.

This past three day weekend was a lot of work. Friday night, Nicole and I drove to Sacramento so we could paint the inside of her mother’s house to ready it for sale. We managed to paint the ceilings in 4 rooms, fully prep three of those rooms, and paint half the dining room and a quarter of the living room, and do the edges in one of the bedrooms. Also we patched the wall where old water damage was so that will be ready for paint in two weeks when we go again.

Then on Monday we cleaned our house and pulled weeds. I don’t know where they came from but there were hundreds of grass seedlings growing on the surface of the crushed granite paths. Definitely not growing from underneath. I focused on pulling those before they got established.

Thanks to Liana for suggesting latex dipped knit gloves. They are small enough to work in and breathe and protect my hands. Unfortunately I can’t find them big enough but I’m doing ok with what I found.

I found a recipe for Indian dry stir fried chicken but I didn’t have all the ingredients so what follows is what I came up with instead, which was really good.

Bowl 1
• 4 bay leaves
• 6 cloves
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp asafoetida

Bowl 2
• 1 tsp corriander
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp ginger powder
• 1 tsp minced garlic
• 1 tbsp cashew butter
• 5 tbsp + 2 tsp water

Bowl 3
• 2 tbsp packed of fresh chopped cilantro
• 3/8 tsp cayenne

Other ingredients
• 1.5 lbs boneless skinless chicken cubed
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp tumeric

Steps
1. Heat oil in a large pan on medium and fry contents of bowl 1 for 1 minute
2. Add chicken and tumeric and stir fry for 5 minutes
3. Add a spoonful from bowl 2 and stir until the liquid is absorbed (about 2 minutes). Repeat about 5 times until bowl 2 is empty.
4. Add the contents of bowl 3 and stir fry for another 2 to 3 minutes.

This one doesn’t try to do as much and so it loads more quickly. Also I think it’s better written. I think if I want the pop-up functionality it had then I should write it myself and in a more standard way so it behaves better.

Also I added a plugin that should allow you to get e-mail notifications to replies for a given post. I haven’t tested it, but it should allow you to get notified when new comments are posted on a post so you don’t have to check back or bother with an RSS feed.

I’ve crossed below 195 as of this morning and measuring my body fat as I do at 5lb intervals, it’s at 19%. That’s pretty surprising since my last 5lb milestone was back on November tenth and I was at 23 or 24%. I attribute the body composition change to walking the dogs more for my legs (Grover gives a good workout) and believe it or not, playing the Wii for my arms. Swinging my arms around playing tennis and baseball and going through the full motions and the various mini-games in Rayman left me with tired arms in the beginning but now not so much.

The other important part of hitting 195 is that it’s the weight I picked to actually get an exercise regimen going. I’d better get to work on that.

When frank Herbert died he left a safe deposit box with notes and a detailed outline for what would be the seventh Dune novel. When Brian Herbert & Kevin J Anderson started writing their prequels the details of the 7th novel were found and that shaped their Butlerian Jihad series to fit in. Now that they are writing the ending book (split into two) I can see the basic story that Frank Herbert had outlined but it seems like the authors didn’t read the previous Dune novels and are just working from an outline of what has happened before.

Technology is made use of thousands of years before it is invented. They have ignored information from the last chapter of the 6th book. They have a character running around afraid something will get found out when two other characters know it already and the character afraid of discovery should know they know (again from the 6th book). These things and more can be overlooked to get the story out, and the story telling is entertaining, but seeing these inconsistencies jar me out of the reading. I find it irritating that they didn’t even have someone who recently read the original novels read their new novels to point out any inconsistencies so they could be fixed.

I’ll still read the finishing novel but then I’m done with any other Dune novels they might write. I hope they decide to release Frank Herbert’s outline and notes when they are done. I’d like to see what was intended.

Last week I made chicken piccata and this week Nicole wanted it again. The difference is that this week started a candida diet so some changes had to be made. The first was no white wine. No problem, I can substitute water or chicken broth. The second change was using brown rice flour instead of wheat flour. That made the result of the fry more crisp. When it came time for the sause though it turned out that Pacific Organic Chicken Broth has sweeteners in it so that was out too. I ended up using water in place of the wine and the broth and I instead added two minced cloves of garlic and a tablespoon of italian seasoning. The last change is no capers since those are packed in vinegar. The end result ended up being good and similar enough in flavor to still call chicken piccata.

Later this week I’ll make my own chicken broth to have around for occasions like this.

Having finally seen the season finale of Top Chef, I’m disappointed. I really wanted Marcel to win since I think he pushes himself and creates the more interesting dishes. Unfortunately he’s not as good at kitchen management which is part of being a chef and that was his downfall. Of course it doesn’t help when you’ve alienated everyone else in the competition.

This past week I had my own cheffy feeling. I needed to do something with the chicken I was going to put with the Vietnamese garlic & ginger fried rice. I started smelling the spices, which is something that I couldn’t really do before allergy treatments, and picked corriander. That wasn’t enough so I kept going and decided on garam masala. I seasoned the chicken pieces with both spices and cooked them in a pan with some piccante olive oil which gave it a spicy after-taste. Yum!

Grover had his latest cancer check-up this morning and was again pronounced all clear. In addition to the poking and prodding he had a chest x-rays and blood drawn. We’ll find out the blood results tomorrow. Our only cause for concern is he recently started having partial seizures on the left side of his face when he’s relaxing or sleeping. They seem to clusted a few in a 24-hour period and then they’re gone for another week or so. It wasn’t the kind of tumor that spreads and if it did it’s very likely to have shown up in the lungs, but the x-rays showed clear on that. No ear infections to cause facial twitches, normal nerve response in the face. Bloodwork will show any abnormalities there. He might just have epilepsy… resting/sleeping seizures tend to indicate that and so would his age to the manifestation time. We just have to wait for more information and see how things progress.

Friday when it was late and I was tired I attempted to upgrade the blog software I use to WordPress 2.1. It was broken until I had a good night’s sleep and was able to tackle it again Saturday morning. The result is not really much difference for the outside user except that it should load a little faster now and there is a nicer text editor for comments (I think I have that enabled). Also, the links aren’t sorted as they used to be or limited in their quantity. I’m working on fixing that.

Also, with this theme if you click options you can set the colors you want to view with, unless you are
using the Opera browser like me in which case clicking Options is more of a way to pass time without any
results except for some light finger exercise.

Related to that, should I allow readers to select the theme they want to view with? There are plugins that
allow that and it might be fun. That way if I choose a theme that you think is ugly you can keep going with
one you like.