It’s Saturday afternoon, heading toward evening, and outside it’s been a gray, gray sort of day, but one that refuses to rain or blow wind. We might go shopping: we have no tempeh in the fridge.
1. From Friday to Saturday
Ms. S. and stayed in Friday to make a night of it, relax, and unwind. We don’t splurge-splurge (it’s about the intensifying, truth-insisting reduplication here), but Friday evenings—ending the ‘work’ week—are a good time to break open a bottle of wine, and when one is doing it on a budget, a great go-to label is Rex Goliath. And a mellow, smooth merlot it was.
As it was a late night, we slept late, but that just leads one from breakfast to brunch, almost as if we had planned it that way.
Waffles it was.
I’ll have more to say about waffles Sunday or Monday, but suffice it to say that they are now a quick, go-to breakfast/brunch item. I don’t need to make a big batch of batter: I can do single-serving amounts, so either a waffle for me, a waffle for her, a waffle split, and so on. I usually give her apples and cinnamon; I usually take blueberries. Coffee and tea and more to round it out; if it had been sunny enough I think I would have suggested sitting out front in the plastic patio chairs.
2. The Boob Tube
The ‘rotation’ consists of SG-1—we’re in season 9 and while I’ve seen it all and have no problem with the post-Jack-O’Neill (two Ls) world, Ms. S. does not approve of Cam “Shaft” Mitchell—, Parks & Rec, and Oz.
More interesting in keeping with the food theme set above was the season finale of Top Chef Masters (TCM), which pitted Chris vs. Kerry. Season 4 began as the too-many-lives-of-Art-Smith, to whom Ms. S. was introduced by way of Lady Gaga’s 2011 Thanksgiving Special. That’s the point when I noticed that the lovable cook of southern comfort food had shed half himself. He brought his food-is-love message back to TCM, and once he was eliminated Lorena carried on the crusade. But as much as I appreciate Art, I did not want him to win; I had a soft spot for Chris from the beginning, even given his flashes of temper directed at Art, which made Ms. S. dislike him a bit more. She didn’t care much for Patricia, either, who was a favorite of mine. But what we agreed on was that we did not care for Kerry. He was the personality void who shuffled from challenge to challenge, episode to episode not so much by winning but by not being eliminated. Furthermore in ‘team’ or ‘pair’ situations he seemed to screw over his partners (Patricia and Lorena), which I’m sure did not endear him to many viewers. I also know that the editing on such shows can be unkind in its attempts to stir up controversy and sympathy.
Suffice it to say, I preferred the character of Chris over the character of Kerry; neither the person nor the chef is known to me, only the television fiction.
We got in some Oz, some Parks & Rec … then we had movie time, and we went with something I’m sure I’ll have to address at greater length later: The Salton Sea (2002).
It’s the type of hot mess that ought to be my new favorite movie. It’s the type of slumming it Val Kilmer did before he went from slumming it to anything-for-a-paycheck. It’s the type of thing you watch and say, “(s)he’s in that!” or “That was so-and-so?!”
The first half of Law Abiding Citizen followed until the Sand Man caught up with Ms. S.
And today, seeing as few interesting college football matchups were available via ESPN3, I instead took in the season (5) premiere of Fringe.
3. Bibliographic Bliss
There is no perfect bibliographic software available, either at the open source, commercial, or specialized level. The plugins and standalone products students and similar use with MS Word and the rest, things like Endnote, are kludges, but they perform their niche task relatively well. A format like BibTeX, which can work with those software packages as an import for export format, is “smarter” than most of the alternatives, but its focus is bibliographies for books or articles, not entire catalogs.
But there are some very useful end-user tools for managing our personal collections. They’re not perfect, but they’re best-of-breed, and they do 90-95% of what most of us need.
If you have an ebook library, you really should be using Calibre. It’s Python, it’s extensible, it’s sane. It manages for you, it has great plugins, and once I learned to love letting software do some things for me, once I gave up being an utter control freak about how files are named, I grew to embrace it.
But if you’re using a Mac and you want to manage the physical books on your shelves, you can do a lot worse than Delicious Library. Back when I was editing an academic journal in 2007 we contemplated it, along with FileMaker’s Bento sub-product, before rolling our own web-based solution. But as an end-user, home database, Delicious Library, which I’d planned on using for years, is really nifty. I just got around to playing with it today. It’s limited and its defaults aren’t perfect; and after using Calibre I see the intelligence behind that product’s design and wish there was a marriage between the two. In short, Calibre does a better job with metadata. But where Delicious Library shines is in being able to just hold a bar-coded book up to your webcam and letting it [1] scan the code and [2] look up the book’s information online. When a barcode is not available, you can type in the ISBN or search by other pieces of information.
Older books do not have ISBNs, but when you’re dealing with anything from North America during the past 30 years you’re pretty much set.
It made working with books delightful again.
We keep reinventing the wheel. As as an amateur software developer who is certain that he is right and the rest of the world is wrong, I’ll invent my own wheel. Once I get it off the drawing board.
So I’m not really cooking today, not really working out, not worrying about fitness or health. I’m taking a day off.
