When you steal acquire comic books off of the Internet, they generally come in one of two convenient formats (or in a very inconvenient format that I don't care about): CBR and CBZ.  CBR files are RAR files that have been renamed, and CBZ files are ZIP files that have been similarly renamed.  Both archives contain multiple individual image files, which are the pages of the acquired comic.  Traditionally, there are two potential ways to deal with these files.  You can rename them back to .rar or .zip, extract them, and use an image viewer to look at the individual pages, or you can use a specialized program that's designed to view "comic archives", which extracts the images to a temporary location and displays them for you.  The latter method is simply several fewer steps than the former.  The "inconvenient" format that I mentioned is "a bunch of images".  This seems to me like a much more difficult way to manage your collection, increases the possibility that you'll end up with 22 complete pages out of a 23-page book, and generally makes your life more complicated.  If you're the kind of person who likes this method of comic organization, more power to you.  But I like the archive method; it fits my needs much more completely.

I was talking to my friend Paul about this a week or two ago, and he mentioned that he'd seen someone with a web-based viewer for comic archives.  Naturally, I spent a bit of time looking for it, because I'm lazy. If I can just load a web page to read comics, I'm 100 times more likely to use it than I am to download & install a comic viewer on each computer I use (please note, I actually have done this; I'm speaking of a theoretical rather than an actual).  I was unable to find such a program, in any language.  So I decided to write one myself.  It's still in a very alpha state, but here are a couple of screenshots of the devlogic.org cbviewer 0.2alpha.  It uses a couple of what seem like non-stock PHP libraries (for the RAR and ZIP support), but the bonus of this is that it doesn't use any external programs to achieve its magic; it's 100% PHP.

I recommend clicking the thumbnails to enlarge, because the tiny squares that wordpress auto-generated really don't do the program justice.  Naturally, I'm still working on the "make it pretty" aspect of designing a web program (aesthetics aren't my strong suit), but at the very least I've managed to get everything working without having to resort to any hacks.  In this version, at least.  In version 0.1a, I was forced to use embedded base64-encoded images to display files that were inside .cbz files, because I hadn't yet figured out how to extract the image to a temporary (and arbitrary) location without being forced to also include whatever sub-directories were included in the archive.  This had the wonderful side-effect of crashing Safari and WebKit.  0.2a eliminates that problem, as well as significantly tightening up the code, reducing the necessary number of source files from 7 down to 4 (by extending some of my previous logic and discoveries, I was able to make the archive-handling and page generation more generic).

And I think I'm done geeking out for a while, at least on this project.  I'll probably tweak the CSS some more, in an attempt to make the site more aesthetically pleasing, but by and large I've got all but one of the features I want.

I didn't really get heavily into cooking until I left home to start college, and I think that's a real shame: I missed out, by my own fault, on at least 5, if not 10, years of cooking that I could have been doing for myself and my family. Cooking is fun, and not only is it amazingly less expensive than eating at restaurants or fast food joints, it's leaps and bounds more nutritious than most prepared foods that someone else would sell me.

Cooking should be a part of every person's life, from the age that he's old enough to understand that food doesn't magically appear on his plate, but is actually made from ingredients. Even better if that food is prepared by a loving family member than by some 16-year-old at McDonald's. The Food Network had a campaign last year on a similar bent; the tagline was "cook with your kids," and I agree with it wholeheartedly. Children shouldn't be insulated from food preparation, and definitely shouldn't be excluded from the kitchen. When I have kids, I thoroughly intend for them to start cooking as soon as they're able to safely reach the work areas and utilize kitchen tools without danger of chopping off a finger. Fine motor control and a knowledge about sharp things means that a child, when well supervised, can certainly slice and chop things like vegetables; I see no reason for children as young as 9 or 10 to not have their own kitchen tools (yes, they're tools), including knives, cutting boards, measuring spoons, etc. Knowledge about hot surfaces like pots and their handles, ranges, and ovens means that a child (again, when well supervised) can actually cook entire meals (or at the very least, portions of meals); I see no need for a child who is tall enough to safely reach the top of the stove (and understand the dangers associated with its misuse) to not use it for its intended purpose. Even as young as 4 or 5, kids can put various ingredients into pots; vegetable soup is easy to assemble: put a soup pot on the kitchen table, and when you finish chopping and slicing a vegetable, put it in a bowl for your child to add to the pot. I firmly believe that food tastes better when you have a hand in its preparation, and passing this belief on to children is one of the best favors you can ever do for them.

And there are so many new flavors to experience on a daily basis that you practically need to cook for yourself if you have any hope of tasting even a small fraction of those flavors in your lifetime. I just discovered how good curries are a month or two ago, and have spent a good portion of this morning looking at various cooking blogs looking for recipes to try out. While I was exposed to German food when I was younger (Dad took C and me to a German restaurant in Dallas a few times), I didn't really begin to appreciate its subtleties until about 6 months ago, when Heather and I went to Fredericksburg. Now I'm thinking about making jägerschnitzel some weekend. After watching Molto Mario for the last 2 or 3 years, I've come to discover how diverse Italian cuisine is, even if I haven't actually made most of the dishes I've seen prepared. But there's a recipe in my cookbook for a "genuine" lasagna Bolognese that I want to make, so I'm trying to find a special occasion that'll feature more than just myself and Heather eating dinner together.

I think it's safe to say that if computers weren't such a big part of my life, I would probably be a chef, or at least a very skilled cook. As it is, I guess I'll just have to be content with cooking tasty food for myself and my family. That, or I'll quit my job, go to culinary school, apprentice in France or England for a few years, then come back to the States and open a restaurant or two, with a new and inventive twist on the cuisine I've grown to love over the years.

Yeah, that'll happen.

Let's start with some background. Alton Brown is by far my favorite TV personality; his quirky yet educational demeanor is perfect for getting across the message of his show, which I believe is "anyone can cook". Good Eats is one of my favorite shows, and I've been watching it as "a dedicated Good Eats viewer" for many years.

That said, here we go. Yesterday's episode was called "Raising the Bar", and it was, as the title might suggest, about bartending (cocktails, drink mixing or "mixology", etc). The history of cocktails was accurate, although having heard it so many times, a little boring. The run-down of the "specialized equipment" was also very good, although truth be told, I (like most bartenders I've worked with, watched, or talked to) tend to only use the base of a Boston shaker in concert with a pint-sized glass instead of that puny base tin. But I like the idea of using a julep strainer instead of a Hawthorne strainer; I'll have to see if I can find one of those for my bar kit. Then there's the actual recipes.

To begin with, the Martini. The recipe presented, with gin, was good enough although I really do feel that a 4:1 or 5:1 ratio (with dry vermouth being the "1") is necessary for a good martini; no "tossing out the vermouth" for me. No, my particular objection is to how it was presented. Naturally, there was the Bond reference; how can you avoid it if you're talking about Martinis? He ordered a "Vodka Martini, shaken not stirred", naturally. It's a shame more people haven't caught onto the Vesper. Anyway, walk into any bar in the world, and if you order a Vodka Martini, shaken, that's what you'll get: Vodka and (at least a little) dry Vermouth in a glass, shaken with ice and strained. If a bartender ever got an order for a vodka martini, shaken and up, and delivered a "traditional" gin martini, stirred and straight up, what would happen probably isn't a "hey, this is pretty good"; what would happen is the bartender would have just wasted 2 or 3 ounces of gin, and the 30 seconds or so it took to make the drink in the first place, and he'd still have to make that vodka martini. Always give the customer what they order, even if you're not charging him for it. If you get an order for a less-flavorful, weak martini, that's what you should make.

The rest of the recipes were OK (the daiquiri and the mint julep), but so many recipe "types" were left out; all that was really hit on here were what I like to call the "hard core" cocktails: mostly liquor, with not much of a mixer. Which is a real shame, since most cocktails that people actually enjoy (and can drink in larger quantities) are made with mixers. Rum and coke is mostly coke, a screwdriver is mostly orange juice, and a margarita is mostly sour mix (or lime juice and simple syrup, if you're a pedantic traditionalist). No, I think the three drinks presented in the show would have been a slightly different list, had it been up to me:

1. A martini, with a bit of discussion on how to switch it up. Gin (or Vodka) and dry vermouth is all well and good, but switch to sweet vermouth and whiskey, and you've got a Manhattan. Swap the vermouth for lemon juice (and keep the vodka), and you've got a lemon drop. Use apple schnapps (yuck) and vodka, and it's an appletini, that oh-so-trendy waste of liquor that drove hipsters wild 3 years ago.

2. You're using the glass by name, so why not make an actual highball (ginger ale and whiskey), along with a few of its cousins? Like the gin & tonic, whiskey and soda, the Cuba Libre (rum and coke with a squeeze of lime). Pretty much any mixed drink with an "and" in the name falls into this category. 7&7, Jack and coke, Whaler's vanilla rum and root beer, take your pick or make up your own.

3. Something with a sweet-&-sour or fruit juice base. Margaritas come to mind, mostly because I live in Texas; I'm not such a big fan of Tequila, but boy are they popular. Or perhaps a whiskey sour. Or heck, you're using the glass my name, why not a Collins (basically, a sour with club soda)? Screwdrivers (orange juice and vodka) also fit into this category, as do Cape Cods (vodka and cranberry) or Bat Bites (which should technically only made with Bacardi light rum, along with cranberry juice and a lime).

4. And then right before the end credits, switch to the uninterrupted voiceover (like the Popcorn segment in Ear Apparent), and make one of the super-mixers like an LIT (that's Long Island Iced Tea for the uninitiated). A highball glass full of ice, 1/2 ounce each of Vodka, Gin and Rum, sour mix to fill, splash of cola to color, and a 1/2 ounce floater of triple sec on top. With a lemon wedge. Just in case you were interested.

Note that none of these are shots; in my oh-so-humble opinion, those are really only for college kids who want to get really hammered, really fast. There's lots of places out there that have shot recipes (like The Webtender, which is my site of choice for drink recipes on the Internet), although my favorite recipe isn't usually even given the name "recipe": Take one shot glass, add Bushmill's Irish Whiskey to fill. Chase with a good cold Bass or Harp.

Which reminds me of another of my hardware peeves: If you've got speed pourers on your bottles, use 'em! Don't pussy-foot around and tip the bottle horizontally when you've got spouts on your bottles: fully invert the bottle; that's what those spouts were built for, and that's also why there's an air return on the back of 'em. Lean to count to 4 (speed pourers flow at a constant rate of 2 seconds an ounce, ya know). Or 8. Feel free to use the spout to pour into a pony or jigger if you don't feel confident enough in your counting, but for crap's sake don't use your equipment inefficiently. LITs (to use the extreme example) are easy enough to make, and take about 10 seconds if you're not bothering to stop and measure each liquor on its own; pour with one bottle in each hand (or two, if you're that cool) for 10 times the production value and twice the speed.

Now, I realize that the show was probably geared more towards the "retro" cocktails, like the ones presented. And mixing cocktails that don't require much in the way of mixers does naturally mean that there's less ingredients to amass in order to make what you want. But come on; why show someone how to scramble an egg if they're really in the mood for a souffle?

And it'll be out on DVD some time this fall. I'm definitely gonna pre-order it as soon as I can. And fast-forward through all the Syd Straw interviews.