Older blog entries for mjs (starting at number 93)

Interesting day yesterday. I went to SFMOMA with yosh, uzi, uzi's girlfriend Doris, their summer subletters Kelly and Vanessa, yakk, and yakk's Aussie friend Tim. Buca di Beppo afterwards. Split a bottle of wicker-basket chianti with Kelly. It packs a surprising punch. The rest of the evening was further downhill in drinking terms. We went to play hyperbowl at the Metreon (or rather, they all played and I watched and partook of the conveninently located adjacent bar), and then came by to my place for hanging out and partaking of beverages (joined by roommates Steph and Nick, and later our friend Adam).

It's sad but drinking really helps me a lot with interacting socially, especially with strangers (near-total silence vs. actually starting conversations [or at least conversation threads]). If only it were not for the unpleasant side effects.

Anyway, after all that business, I tried to go to sleep but I couldn't (too many thoughts to fit in my head) so here I am posting a semi-incoherent advogato diary entry to pass some time.

It's getting light out (or at least getting light gray - lovely SF fog and all), which means it will probably be hard to sleep now even if I get in the right headspace. Oh well.

Pretty uneventful day. I decided a couple of days ago that I'd go to the gym for as long as I'm unemployed. I may be poor, but at least I'll be in shape. They have a really vicious stomach crunch machine.

For dinner I made myself pan-fried breaded snapper, with mashed yukon gold potatos and canellini in a sauce of onions, marjoram, butter and tomato paste. The snapper was marinated in olive oil, rice vinegar, balsamic vinergar, soy sauce and little dash of worcestershire sauce, which gave it a sweet yet slightly tangy flavor. I breaded the fish the way my mom taught me, first dip in flour, then beaten whole eggs, then bread crumbs made by grating a dry leftover pieces of french bead. The beans came out a bit too buttery, but the fish ended up really really good. I need to try that marinade again sometime.

I didn't hack much at all today, but tomorrow I'll definitely put in serious work on the mystery project.

the past

Since some people seem to like my dinner descriptions, here's what I've made the past two nights:

Wednesday: Spaghetti with white-wine cream sauce and peas (I must say the cream sauce really loses something without tarragon, but I made up for it by throwing in a bit of sugar).

Tuesday: Pan-fried cubed potatoes with onions, chorizo, paprika, black pepper and salt. A very orange meal. I put in a bit too much olive oil, I'll have to watch that for next time I make this dish (which Steph requested). Maybe add some black beans too.

I watched the fire-spinning people from Anything that Moves with Alex.2. They are a cool crowd to hang out with. Nice email from Alex.1 when I got back.

More N hacking (need to finish up this bug fix).

Steph made an excellent dinner last night for me and Mark. Summer rolls to start, with a spicy peanut sauce. Then the main course: scallop skewers in a light garlic cause on a bed of black rice, with sides of asparagus/carrot stir-fry and vinegar-marinated cucumber/radish salad. For desert we had lemongrass sorbet with mango and passionfruit. All accompanied by a good white wine, courtesy of Mark.

hacking

I've suddenly gotten really excited about hacking again. I'm working on fixing Nautilus bug 1248, a relatively small bonobo usage type point, but ultimately my work should help improve the performance and sanity of web browsing with Nautilus.It's already pretty decent though. I'm posting this diary entry with Nautilus.

The next thing I want to work on is the oft-requested "efm feature".

Iron Chef night tonight. Steph, Taska, Elise, Adam, Eric and Alex (the local one) were there.

Mark sent me a link to an interesting Drum n Bass audio stream (if you are into that sort of thing).

Also, I can't stop listening to the VNV Nation remix of Suicide Commando's "Hellraiser".

I need to get hacking more seriously again I think. I'm building a fresh Nautilus now.

Wow, a lot has happened since I last wrote.

Nautilus 1.0 came out and everyone hated it. Then we added like 4 or 5 features and everyone loves it. Fickle world.

Eazel is at a strange point in it's life cycle. I may have to figure out what else to do with my life. If you have any good leads, let me know.

I'm hosting a visitor this weekend. We'll see how that all works out.

GNOME 1.4 Beta 1 got out on time. I am very tired now.

Nautilus 1.0 looks more and more impossible with people sticking to the date but adding requirements.

life

I helped rebecka make Beef Burgundy last night from a fairly involved recipe. We went out drinking with yakk at a really weird bar in the mission and then we partook of the food, which was most excellent.

iron chef

Oh man - Battle Foie Gras was one of the best episodes I have ever seen. I really wish I could be an Iron Chef taster.

I've been enjoying spending time with my friend rebecka lately. We hadn't been talking or spending time together as much as we used to of late, and it turned out each of us thought it was because the other had become disintetersted or something.

Anyway, she actually came to Iron Chef Night on Friday and although she was a bit grumpy it was nice to see her. We decided we should get together on Saturday and figure out something fun to do. We decided to make dinner together and then go out dancing at Eklektic, a local drum n bass club.

I headed over to Rebecca's place around 5 with a bottle of decent Pinot Grigio from the corner store wine shop in tow. We went out to the fish store in her neighborhood and picked out a steak of what was supposed to be Chilean Sea Bass but it seemed to be priced way too cheap to actually be that. We also picked up assorted vegetables, including Yuca root, which neither of us had prepared before, but we decided we'd definitely figure it out.

Dinner came out really well. We had marinated sea bass steak in a sauce of white wine, lemon, shallots, tarragon, capers, garlic, black pepper and tomatos (I tossed some finely chopped tomatos in right when the sauce was done and ready to be served so there'd be tomatos in it but the whole thing did not get all tomatoey), served on a bed of lightly sauteed spinach. On the side we had boiled yuca root sauteed in garlic and fresh squeezed orange juice.

The wine went pretty well with the food and we had a great long conversation. After the main course we had some bread and cheese, and for desert, sweet ricotta with raspberries. With this we had some semillon desert wine that I'd gotten for Rebecca in Australia, and then finally some (actually decent) coffee.

We sat around and talked some more and finally headed out to the club in her Miata. We both had a really good time dancing. Most people I take clubbing with me can't keep up with me dancing, especially when it's drum n bass, but Rebecca was actually stretching my limits. She said she really liked the place and wanted to go back.

All in all it was a really nice evening, and we didn't severely irritate each other despite being together pretty much non-stop from 5 PM to 3 AM.

I have not posted for a while. Whatever. I have been mildly cranky lately for assorted reasons. Work is going mostly OK but I am kind of worried that the community around GNOME is dying and the team spirit is gone. I know there is blame to go around to many people, but I fear it will get worse before it gets better.

That being said, I really look forward to GUADEC. I also really look forward to getting GNOME 1.4 shipped.

On a completely different note, I had a lovely dinner with stephane at Delfina tonight. I had a "salt cod brandade" appetizer. I had no clue what to expect it to be, but it turned out to be a baked mix of salt fish and mashed potatoes and doubtless other stuff, with cracker like things to dip it on. Most excellent! Steph had a scallop carpaccio which I tried a bit of, and it was also pretty good.

For the main course, I had chilean sea bass with melted leeks in a lemon butter sauce with capers. Now, I don't know how they do it, but the texture of the leeks made them actually seem, I dunno, melted. It was weird. Steph had short ribs with Polenta which also tasted pretty good, from the small bite I had. We enjoyed all this with a good California Chardonnay.

For desert, we had a 20 year old tawny port (yum!) and I had a buttermilk panna cotta with blood orange slices while steph enjoyed profiteroles with ice cream. I also had an espresso in a futile attempt to make myself walk straight.

When we got home, we watched Lexx, which was a good capstone to the evening. Lexx is really messed up, but a really great show.

Anyway, I'll try to post more often, but who knows.

I'm back from linux.conf.au. vicious and I had a blast. I shall have to post about our adventures.

Here's my original solution to the problem mbp mentioned.

Actually, the problem was originally "explain how the code below works". I think this is sort of structurally similar to graydon's solution.

(define ((f s) g) (let h ((n (call-with-current-continuation (lambda (x) (g x) x))) (l (string->list s))) (cond ((pair? l) (display (car l)) (h (c n) (cdr l))))))

((f "Js nte ceeWnae") (f "utAohrShm anbe"))