Blogging Ottinger (tim)

My wife made a new pasta dish for supper. It features pasta (shells), and a peri-peri cream sauce. The sauce is made from chicken pan drippings, garlic, milk, semi-soft cheese and Nando’s chickenland peri-peri sauce (made from birds-eye peppers). She should post a recipe for it, but it was quite nice. More hot sauce.

So, I’m walking past a guy’s desk last week and I see four or five baggies of hot peppers. Some green, some red, some as long as your middle finger, some shorter than your thumb. Beautiful beautiful fire fruit. I inquired and found that they were indeed not spoken for and free for the asking.

Now it’s Sunday. I get a hankering to create. So out comes the equipment and I start chopping. The little red peppers are quite sweet and tasty, though milder than I expected. The green ones are hot hot hot. I put them all through the coffee grinder and the whole house starts smelling wonderful.

I drop them in a saucepan and sweat them out with some salt and water, and then toss in some ginger and mustard. To add a bit of sweetness and depth, I add a bit of honey and soy sauce. This cooks down for a while, and then I drop in a little Meyer’s rum (relax: in my house it’s an ingredient, not a beverage. It deepens the flavor and makes the heat hold on a little longer). This cooks down for a while to give the alcohol a chance to evaporate. Eventually almost all the water is gone, and it’s time to turn the paste into sauce.

There wasn’t a whole lot of paste. Libby helps me figure out that we can use a nice, large, porcelain coffee mug to hold the cooked peppers so that I can run the immersion blender. In a few minutes, it’s a nice smooth sauce. Well, smooth enough.The sauce is quite thick and clings nicely to the bottle, the spoon, and my finger. It all goes into some bottles (previously rinsed, washed with bleach, rinsed a bunch more) through a household funnel. I have enough for one standard hot-sauce bottle and part of another.

I think this is my best homemade hot sauce so far. I got the proportions under control, kept the liquids to very small amounts, and didn’t go overboard with additional flavorings. It has a good flavor and a decent persistent heat behind it. My wife and kids even like it, which is pretty cool.

The test:

When I put it on a cracker and hold it vertically, the sauce doesn’t run. I start the online stopwatch and take a good bite. The burn starts in about 10 seconds, and is spreading pretty good within 30. It’s not killer hot. My whole mouth is nonetheless feeling pretty tingly around 45 seconds, and the heat fades out in three or four minutes. After 4 minutes I can tell that I have eaten something spicy in the past, but the tingle is pretty slight.

Update:

So I finally tried it on actual food, and found it’s not spicy enough though I bet it would be good on eggs in the morning. Today I’m using it like ketchup. I’m often amazed at how hot a sauce needs to be to really stand up to chicken or pork. Maybe next time I should add some habenero?

Continuing my interest in some kind of a P90 guitar, I was looking in a guitar magazine the other day when I saw an entry for the PRS SE Soapbar, a P90 (soapbar) equipped electric guitar with some great looking wood, finishes, and appointments. It’s got a stop tailpiece, two P90s with shared tone/volume controls and a three-way switch. It looks like there’s a wrap-around bridge. It has a set mahogany neck and a mahogany body.

One of my friends works in a wood shop, and told me that mahogany fumes are toxic. That saddens me, because mahogany is such a great looking wood and so great for guitar bodies and necks. I hope that these are made in safe conditions.

The tobacco sunburst model of the PRS SE is no less impressive.
My wife thought that it looked pretty nice, even with the creme soapbars instead of the black that she and I generally prefer.

The guitar is one of the under-$500.00 models reviewed in my guitar magazine. It got pretty high marks, and was one of Guitar Player’s picks. I’ve personally not played it, but PRS has a very solid reputation. I would expect it to be very playable (as the reviewers said) and of high quality overall.

It is apparently made overseas, by the way. But this is not the first time I’ve praised the foreign guitars that CNC has made possible.

Its black-finished brother appears in a little video here:

P90s are just too cool. I still have a mild fascination with Duncan’s SHPR-1 pickups but I could so see buying one of these (probably the red) some day and keeping it in heavy rotation. What a beauty of a guitar.

Note: this is not a ringing endorsement of their other comics or their choice of name. But this comic I find hilarious.

Also funny, though real and potentially useful isBacon Salt. I have got to try this out.

I love Old-Time Radio (OTR) generally. I laugh with Jack Benny, especially knowing how hard he had to work to keep Rochester on his show in a time when the networks thought that having a real black man on the radio would infuriate listeners (Amos and Andy were white “minstrel” performers, whose portrayal of uneducated black southerners is a little hard to take in these times). I have had many smiles while listening to Fibber McGee and have followed serials like the old Superman series. The Lux Radio Theater, The Shadow, The Blue Beetle, and the rest are interesting bits of American history, a glimpse into older times, and a decent way to pass a little time on a train or plane or while waiting to fall asleep. For the most part, they are merely entertainment and a glimpse into the past. Yet every once in a while, an episode or commercial shows the dark side of the times.

In the episode of “In The Name of The Law” titled “Nothing Ever Happens in Chinatown”, a shopkeeper is murdered. His nephew is taken in for questioning, and after some racial epithets he is locked alone in a dark room until he confesses. The closing voice-over says “Once again, truth and justice triumph…. in the name of the law!!!”

It reminds me how far we’ve come. In the mid-30s I’m sure the average listener took it for granted that the white police officers were the good guys, and was happy to see how the heroes played on the superstitions and fears of the primitive criminal to wring out a confession. Now when I hear this, I hear only that torture and racism triumphed, in spite of the law.

Likewise, some of the OTR sites will provide the old programs with their original commercials. These are equally blood-curdling. One that bothered me in particular was a cigarette ad promising that smoking made you a more responsible worker, or the one that told you that their brand was better for you and recommended by doctors. I flinched when I heard the ad that closed with “why not pick up a carton and get started today?” Knowing what we know now, these seem so malevolent and wrong. Check out a sample ad or two and see how they hit you.

Some people might like to see these programs banned (as happened with many offensive old cartoons and shows in the 70s and 80s). On the contrary, I’m thinking those disturbing moments make the OTR archives more valuable. In the present, we think we know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. We might be surprised when we look back forty years from now and see how bigoted and arrogant we were in the 2000s. Hopefully someone will have preserved the popular programming of our times and we’ll find that we’ve learned enough to be uncomfortable with some of the humor, imagery, and advertising that we take for granted now.

This is a hang solo. Hang is some cool stuff. Looks like flying saucer, sounds like steel drum… kinda.

Aaaaarrrrrrrrr

Just because Stack Overflow offers a RSS Feed don’t think that you should necessarily subscribe to it. Not unless you happen to have fifteen or twenty extra hours to spend on feed triage each day. I subscribed two days ago, and I have already done the “mark all read” at least twice on this feed.

Talk about drinking from a firehose.

NYT has an article about mistakes parents make, leading to kids that eat boring or unhealthy food. I think we avoided most of these. Our kids have had a lot of food exposure, even the occasional “food adventure” when we would take them somewhere and we’d get food that none of us have ever had. Now they’re adventurous.

I will admit to having pressured (even forced) kids to try something. Not all the time, but sometimes. Mainly, when one of them (guess which) told me he would not eat beans after loving them for years. His friends told him they were disgusting, and I wasn’t going to let his friends decide his food habits nor was I going to let him tell me what he would and would not do. So we had some battle of wills.

Otherwise, I think we’ve done really well. My kids will eat just about anything, though my youngest doesn’t like eating meat very often. I figure that’s fine. It’s not like he dares me to make him eat it. The boys don’t see cooking as “womens work” (nor do they draw a men’s v. women’s distinction). Both of them like a lot of veggies and cuisines.

I may not be a perfect dad, but at least I don’t have to bribe the kids to get them to eat anything but nuggets & fries. I guess I’ve done a few things well.

I’m glad to have pyfit, mostly because I’m glad to have something that works like fitnesse works. I’m not a huge fitnesse fan (it has some serious issues) but I’m a user.

However, the pyfit internals are pretty confusing to me. Today’s bit is really odd. There is a function in Variations. py called returnVariation() that takes a parameter called env. That argument is never used in the function and never passed to any other function it calls. Note that there is even a __pychecker__ trick there to turn off the syntax checker’s warning about unused parameters.

Generally the function is called and the return value is ignored. Clearly we’re dependent on side-effects here.

def returnVariation(env=None):
    __pychecker__ = \"no-argsused\"
    if FitGlobal.Environment == \"FitNesse\":
        result =  FitNesseVariation()
    elif FitGlobal.Options.standardMode:
        result =  StandardVariation()
    elif FitGlobal.Options.useCSS:
        result = FitVariation()
    else:
        result = StandardVariation()
    FitGlobal.annotationStyleVariation = result
    return result

If you drop the argument, then tests stop passing.

def returnVariation():

Even though it’s never used and never passed. Even if you drop the parameter and set env to None:

def returnVariation():
    env=None
    __pychecker__ = \"no-argsused\"
    if FitGlobal.Environment == \"FitNesse\":
        result =  FitNesseVariation()
    elif FitGlobal.Options.standardMode:
        result =  StandardVariation()
    elif FitGlobal.Options.useCSS:
        result = FitVariation()
    else:
        result = StandardVariation()
    FitGlobal.annotationStyleVariation = result
    return result

There is one place where the function is called, passing a string value as env, otherwise it is always None, and it is still never passed to any method or installed in a global/local/module variable. But it somehow causes tests to fail if you remove it.

Wow.. talk about programming with a ball and chain on!

A local store had jalapeno peppers at a great price, so I picked up about 8 of them and brought them home. My wife got the milk, cilantro, etc. It was jalapeno soup day. This time we simplified and kept the recipe down to peppers, onion, garlic, salt, pepper,oil, flour milk, water, and avocado. This was the best consistency we’ve gotten so far, but I too too much of the fun out of the peppers.

Since this was for the family, I didn’t use the whole pepper. I seeded them, so it was really just the shells for the most part (I used the innards of three of them). I decided to see how hot the peppers were and my youngest son and I tasted them. They were sweet and mild and quite tasty, but not hot at all. Jason decided to eat a seed, and was surprised that it wasn’t hot either. Finally I decided to chop of some of the innards (technical placenta that holds the seeds) and eat a bit of that.

Okay, that was hot. Jason and I commenced having hot pepper contests. How long could we hold it in our mouths, how big of a piece can we stand, etc. It was a really good time. It’s tasty, and gives that nice tingle.

When the soup was done and we tasted it, we decided it needed more peppers and a bit more heat next time. I will have to stop next week at Butera and see if they have any more. I will definitely put more of the pepper innards in, and may cook up to a dozen peppers in the next batch. Yummy stuff.

As near as I can recall:

8 Jalapeno Peppers, half seeded and veined (keep the seeds, etc for more heat)
1 1/2 teaspoons of minced garlic
1/2 large onion
1/4 cup cilantro
1 avocado
oil to cover the peppers, garlic, & onion (probably a half-cup)
flour (about as much as oil to make a thick roux)
3 cups milk
4 cups water (stock would have been better)
3 teaspoons of salt
2 teaspoons of pepper (more would have been okay)

That’s really not so many ingredients, at least not many you don’t always have on hand.

I don’t miss the extra ingredients. I wonder if I can simplify this a bit more.

Is success an indicator of virtue? In light of the balance sweeper that appropriated (we can’t say “stole” becuase “it was a business decision, not a legal decision”) customers money… by the millions, I can’t see the virtue.

I can’t imagine how anyone financing an executive bonus pool by stealing money from customers is able to stay out of jail. Or why we would want a system like that. If the *company* is at fault and not the *individuals*, I’m sure Citi will raise the money from other customers to pay those who were robbed. That’s hardly reasonable. I wonder what Citi would have done had someone “swept” their balances of 1/10th the money. I bet they’d be sure to phrase it “wrongdoing”. In court. In shrill voices. I would be we’d here “irreparable” in there, too.

Of course, I bet the board will have something to say about this. It almost makes me want to buy stock just so I can go to the shareholder meeting.

Do you suppose these executives will take a hit on their credit report over this? I wonder if it will put them in sub-prime mortgage territory.

But wait: if they’re found guilty of doing this, then that opens up the company to any number of criminal and civil suits, doesn’t it? Maybe justice is present, but not immediate. I guess I can trust that ultimately there will be some punishment that makes sense.

Another report.
And another report.

Surely there is a rule somewhere that will help me keep my -ance and -ence straight, along with -ant and -ent. Am I relevant or relevent? Sigh. Any good rule of thumb would do. Right now I have to rely on spelling checkers built into my editors, and that makes me unhappy.

Where is Pedantic Grammar Man/Woman when you need him/her?

Arrrgh!

You should NEVER use the lower-case L as a variable name. Ever. Especially if you’re going to have it in proximity to a 1 (which is a one, a fact that I have to call out because it looks like the l, which is an L). Ever. Never ever ever. Even in Python, which is one of the most readable languages in the world when it’s done correctly.

   2  def perm(l):
   3      sz = len(l)
   4      if sz < = 1:
   5          return [l]
   6      return [p[:i]+[l[0]]+p[i:] for i in xrange(sz) for p in perm(l[1:])]

The algorithm/snippet is okay, other than the choice of variable names, with is quite dreadful all the way through.

URL withheld to protect the butthead.