In other news, “The Hidden Truth about Calories” is both fascinating and, luckily, not just a rehash of other recent blogs and articles questioning the old wisdom “a calorie is a calorie.”
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Summer Soups
Ms. S. recently dubbed me the King of Soups. It’s possible that she was exaggerating; it’s possible that I misremember exactly what she said. But hyperbole or not, it’s true that soups have recently been “my thing.”
Before this year if asked about what I cooked or baked “best” or “most enthusiastically,” eaters of my food would probably say dessert. For the longest time—since 1992 or there about—I provided cookies and muffins and brownies to departments and secretaries. I’ve never made a bad pie crust. After reading a Jasper Fforde novel I baked a Battenberg cake, I’ve prepared Sacher Torte after Sacher Torte for my students, and impressed Austrians with both the former and poppyseed cakes (Mohnkuchen). A few years ago I got into custards and puddings.
These things are relatively easy.
… and Dinosaurs … IN SPACE!
We always catch things a day late. Or several days late. It’s wibbly-wobbly-2012-DVR-timey-wimey stuff. And so: Sunday evening we got around to the latest Doctor Who episode, the delightful “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.”
Talk about truth in advertising. Continue reading
Posted in Doctor Who
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“The Future Won’t Look Like This […]”: a snippet of commentary
The A.V. Club has a list of 11 unintentionally ridiculous depictions of virtual reality, which the commentors find intriguing primarily for what is not included (e.g. Unix-girl in Jurassic Park, which then inspired a spirited defense, etc.), and I’d add Hackers, though, as with Jurassic Park, it’s more about the GUI than VR. But I felt a need to contest one of the included entries, number four on the list: David Cronenberg’s 1999 feature eXistenZ.
“Primer” meets “The Prestige” … in the Bermuda Triangle
That’s “Triangle” (2009), which I played in the background while [1] S was at work (sorry … I wasn’t trying to be the deadbeat), [2] I was doing a little cleaning, [3] a cat insisted upon sitting on my lap and being scratched, and [4] I was contemplating my life choices.
Web Projects #3: Framework Choice
I spent my time in Hungary and Romania, and later in Belgium. It was no surprise when, years later, a friend gave me a box set of Django Reinhardt’s early recordings. It’s 2012 and I’m looking forward to Tarantino’s latest/next, Django Unchained. That I ended up using Django may then come as no surprise.
It was not, however, always the only option.
Names are hard. Or not. (aka: TL;DR)
When I worked at the Journal of Asian Studies and re-developed their books and book reviews database as a Django application what took me the longest—perhaps discounting procrastination—was not the actual coding or testing, both of which went rather quickly once I was in a ‘zone,’ but rather the modeling of certain pieces of data.
These included but were not limited to ‘Books’ and publishers as well as lots of ‘utility containers/relationships,’ things more or less ontology vapid on their own but necessarily for modeling or business logic. My pet peeve and personal project, what became the monkey on my back, what I over-analyzed, etc., was how to represent names.
Posted in Code
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Web Projects #2: Language Choice
When I began my web apps back in 2007 I was adamant about a few things but quite flexible regarding others. I cared about the integrity of my data: I would not be using MySQL, and SQLite was for testing, only. The production machine would be PostgreSQL. A LAMP-ish arrangement was likely, but while I had plenty of experience with Linux (and other Unixes) as well as Apache, and I had already decided on an RDBMS, my language skills were geared toward modern languages, not the computer variety. Years of Linux work had left me competent with shell scripting; I used bash but always eyed zsh. The question was: Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby?
Various and Sundry, the First
A new month, new … obligations? Tasks? Goals?
January 1st ‘the goal,’ such as it was, was to do a drawing-per-day. That lasted until February 4th. One or two days in there I may have ‘missed’ my scheduled sketch, done two another day, and back-dated the late works … I couldn’t even claim that the dog ate it.
We have no dog.
Yet.
Posted in Various and Sundry
Tagged Kant, Killing Joke, Sweat Home Alabama, Whiskey, X-Men
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Recapping the Synthetic and Dialectical
In my current GN 265 (German Literature in Translation, 19th & 20th centuries) course we are preparing a second short essay as well as final papers; this is an opportunity to return to discussing different types of writing styles for essays. We wrote traditional “TS123C” (Topic Sentence, 3 supporting arguments or pieces of evidence, and a Conclusion) style essays earlier. For the name “TS123C” I have Mrs. Ascuena (9th grade) to thank; and, indeed, these are basic, high school level kinds of essays.
But they work.
Posted in Teaching, Writing
Tagged Death in Venice, Hegel, Heidegger, Hesse, Kafka, Martyrs, Rilke, Steppenwolf
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