OK, I’m gonna have to start out with a bit of geek-translation and/or explanation.

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.

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There’s a blog called Very Good Taste, and from said blog, a food-eater’s meme has exploded onto the blogosphere (and that’s hopefully the last time I use that particular term in a non-ironic sense).  The meme is called “The Omnivore’s Hundred”, and it’s simply a list of 100 different foods that “[Andrew thinks] every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life.”  Instructions and results are below the fold.…

A test video. Just my fat fingers counting, but it should be enough to make sure I hacked the plugin properly.

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The main reason I wanted to get it set up was so I could email photos to the blog from my phone.  The default WordPress email handler, however, doesn’t play well attachments; it expects plain-text posts.  Lucky for me, there’s a plugin called Postmaster that solves the problem very nicely.  It handles pictures and videos in emails that are sent to the blog-by-mail address, and embeds ’em into new posts.  It even resizes pictures (retaining their aspect ratios) and auto-links them to the originals, and supposedly puts the videos into an embed tag that contains a quicktime player.  It looks like it might be ActiveX-based, though, so I might need to test that out and find a linux-based solution if appropriate.

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Heather drew this one. She’s silly, and that’s one of the thousand reasons I love her.

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Just a test post to see if I got blog-by-mail working correctly.

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The hardest part of starting to write in a new notebook is actually making the first mark on the first page.  I find it difficult to come up with something “good enough” or “witty enough” or “befitting the purpose of the book”.  Hopefully, I’ll change that with these stack of Cahiers.  They’re small and relatively inexpensive (more an upscale notepad than anything else), so I won’t feel too bad about using it for anything I’d like, as opposed to the hard-bound Moleskine notebooks that I carry around in my bag, which I’ve yet to fill even a third of the way out of a desire to make sure that what I write is “worth it”.

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I made some biscuits this morning, partly because I’d posted a comment over at my friend Katelyn’s blog little woman, but mostly because I just wanted some biscuits with breakfast.  They turned out OK, although I’d have liked for ’em to be a little more brown on the tops.  Ah, well.  “Read More” for the recipe.

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Well, bread and soup.  For dinner the other night, Heather and I made some tasty vittles, a roasted garlic soup (which was actually more of a tomato and onion bisque than a garlic soup) and some Blitz Bread.  And I have to say, it’s the tastiest meal that we’ve thrown together in a long time.

A pointer about the bread (which you could also get by reading the comments on the post to which I’ve linked): if you use active dry yeast instead of instant yeast (because that’s what you buy), you’ll need to soak 1.5 Tablespoons of yeast in all of the called-for water (which should be at “blood temperature”) for about 5 minutes before mixing everything together.  This is called “blooming” the yeast, and it’s necessary because of the high temperatures at which active dry yeast is, um, dried.  When the yeast dries at those temperatures, lots of them die, and the ones that survive are encased in a shell of dead yeast.  Blooming allows the dead yeast to separate away from the live ones, making the rise much more effective.  Instant yeast is dried at a relatively lower temperature, resulting in fewer dead yeast cells, meaning you can add it directly to the dry ingredients without blooming.  Ah, the things you learn by watching Good Eats.

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It seems I’ve decided to at least work on the backend of the blog again, if not make a conscious effort to post more often (although I suppose that if I post about every update I make, that’ll at least be something).

I created a new blog for Heather this morning; check it out if you feel so inclined. Only one post so far, but there’s only so much that happens in one day, you know?

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