Ravings of an intermittent fool

Gallery Patch

There is another patch available for Gallery, the popular open source photo album software. Since I wasn't on the latest p1 patch, I did the full upgrade rather than just applying the deltas to the affected files. I ran into a snag where running the configuration wizard post install resulted in an empty config.php file. That causes all sorts of problems. Basicly it will tell you that the gallery isn't configured but when you go to the configuration wizard, the page won't load. Highly annoyin and took me awhile to figure out. Fortunately, I had a backup of my install, so i just replaced the config.php with the old one and the configuration wizard ran fine.

via Unix Girl

Cilantro Lime Chicken

I had some leftover cilantro and limes from the weekend so went searching for recipes. There was surprising variations so here was my take:

2 tsp sugar
6 cloves of garlic sliced thin
2 tsp soy sauce
juice of two limes
freshly ground black pepper
a small handful of cilantro chopped fine
1/4 tsp of roasted red pepper flakes

I mixed this and added to a ziplock bag filled with 4 chicken breasts. I let them marinade for about an hour and half before grilling them.

They turned out quite nicely. Very juicy with a nice subtle hint of cilantro. I will try this again with more limes and maybe a bit more red pepper.

Gallery Nitpick

I'm a big fan of Gallery and use it to power my photo gallery. Recently, I had found out that a few people had left some comments on the photos but I had never found out because I didn't have comment notification turned on. After spending a bunch of time turning it on individually for each album (I have a lot of albums), I went looking for a global configuration switch to control this. Alas, there is not. You would think this would be available. If I have overlooked it, please let me know.

Reds vs. Expos

Jena was able to snag free tickets for James, harry, Jeff, Angela and I so we spent last Friday at the ballpark. Great day for the game and although the Reds lost in the end, it was a good time.

More photos in the gallery.

Taste of Cincinnati Photos

Finally got around to posting the pics from the Taste of Cincinnati. I previous posted my review and the rest of the photos are in the gallery.

SLVR ANV

A silver Porsche Boxter...Now that's what I call a great silver anverisary present.

(BTW: I just started a new gallery photo album devoted to the license plates I come across).

Birthday Dinner

Jeff kindly arranged a nice get together for my birthday at Baba India in Oakley. It was a very nice way to spend my birthday.

Thanks Jeff and to everyone who came.

More pictures here.

The Daily WTF

The Daily WTF is a nice collection of all those weird and wacky things that make us stop and say WTF.

French Bread Pizza Rustica Redux

As I mentioned before, French Bread Pizza is an incredibly easy and adaptive recipe. I made this latest batch with Italian Sausage and spicy Capicola. Yummy.

Taste of Cincinnati

Taste of Cincinnati was this past weekend and I attended on Saturday and Monday. Although I've been in Cincinnati for almost 6 years this is my first Taste experience. I was very impressed with the festival. It was busy but not too crowded and there is nothing wrong at all with having dozens and dozens of the city's great resturants hawking their tastey wares. My personal favs:

Famous Baked Potato Soup from the Courtyard Cafe - So unbelievablely creamy

Andy's Mediterranean Grill's Kibbeh - Moist minced meat in a football shaped outer crust made from lamb and bulger wheat

Andy's Mediterranean Grill's Chicken Tawook on a Skewer - So juicy with such powerful flavor...incredible

Mike Fink's Maryland Crab Cake with Chilli Mayo - lots of crab and a nice blend of spices

Song Long's Curry Chicken Wings - Not greasy, perfectly cooked and an interesting flavor

Song Long's Sweet and Sour Chicken - They found a way to make this ho hum staple of Chinese resturants stand out by making the battered chicken be very light, very crispy and not greasy at all

Tandoor's Mulligatawny Soup - My first time trying this dish and i wil definitely be trying it again

Tandoor's Vegetable Samosa - Great crispy shell and and a nice spicey filling

I will definitely be trying out Song Long, Andy's and Tandoor in the near future. Finding new gems of resturants is what this festival is all about.

I did notice that there are some chains on the list of resturants. While its obvious that all of the resturants attend for advertising/community relations purposes, I think some of them do a better job then most. Don Pablo's for example has 4 menu items and shows off somethings the average resturant goer might not have tried. However, places like LaRosa's pizza and GoldStar chilli serve there most popular menu items. I guess tehre are some people who are looking for a known quantity and are bit less adventurous then me, but come on, isn't that the whole point of a festival of this type?

Update: My Photos from the event are now online.

Ralphie May and Lahna Turner

Saw Ralphie May with opening act Lahna Turner (surprisingly enough his girlfriend) at the Funny Bone on the Levee last night. I wouldn't see them if you offend easily but if you don't you will laugh out loud all night. I was a bit hesitant before the show started since I had seen him on Colin Quinn's Tough Crowd and hadn't liked him a whole lot. I was very pleasantly surprised.

Ralphie also let people onto something that I should have known instinctively but hadn't crossed my mind. If you want to see more comedy for the same price, go see the last show of the night. If the comedian is good and enjoying themselves, they will do more material. He said that he did 50 minutes during the first show. He did almost 2 hours during the show I saw. From now on, I will be going to the second show if I can.

Mother's Guilt

When I was at my parent's house last weekend, the inevitable topic of what to do with my room came up. Ever since I moved out permantly over8 years ago,,, my mother has been talking about what to do with my old room. Even before I had left for college in 1994, she had talked about doing some remodeling. After all, besides a new bedspread and curtains, the room was pretty much unchanged since we moved there in 1980. Well now that my parents are finally redoing their room (it also was exactly the same since we moved in), she has steped up her seriousness of her plans for my old room. While talking about her plans with me she let on that she felt bad because it took so long to finally get started with doing something with my room. She also said she felt bad about the choice of curtains because she said that I strongly liked a different set that she didn't choose way back when. This completely floored me: a.) because I can't imagine having that strong of an opinion over a window treatment and b.) if she is feeling guilt about this minor thing that happened over 10 years ago, then what other seemingly innocuous things have I done to bring her grief over the years.

Great License Plate

Saw this on the way home from Wheeling. That must come in handy during traffic stops.

Amy's Bridal Shower and a trip home

This past weekend, Angela and I went back to West Virgina. She attended my sister's bidal shower and I went to visit with out of town relatives who came in for Amy's party. It was certainly a good time but it definitely had an unexpected side effect. All of my relatives noticed my recent weight loss. This is the first time any of them had seen me since Christmas. This is the same group of relatives that I will see in 4 weeks at our annual family reunion in South Carolina. That is definitely some positive peer pressure to stay on the weight loss track.

More pictures are available.

How not to build a project

I thought I had seen every which way of building a project but yesterday, I saw a first. While most people use Ant, or Make or a shell script or an IDE's built in suport, I had never seen anyone use the copy and paste technique. This person had a text file of all the commands needed to compile his application, one per class. For example:

javac com/foo/bar/One.java
javac com/foo/bar/Two.java
javac com/foo/bar/Three.java
And so on...

You get the picture. To compile a class here is the process:

Open a command prompt.

Find the command in the text file that changes directories to the proper one and copy it.

Paste said command into the command prompt and execute it.

Next find the classpath statement in the text file and copy it.

Paste that comamnd into the command prompt and execute it.

Next find the javac command for the file that you are editing and copy it.

Paste that in the command prompt and execute it.

Now imagine repeating those last few steps over several files and several mistakes of picking out the wrong commands out of that text file. I was shocked and amazed. Oh by the way, this wasn't the only way the developer was enamored with copy and paste. It didn't matter how short the string of text was, if it was in the source file somewhere else, he would copy and paste it instead of type it. Same goes with Javadoc. If he found a method in Javadoc, there would be lots of flipping back and forth to copy and paste the class and method names. Suffice it to say, it was a very illuminating afternoon.