This morning for frühstück we had Pfannkuchen, or German style pancakes. The recipe was a little thinner than Sibylle remember from her childhood, but the flavor was right, and we both enjoyed them.
(I actually only used 5 eggs, as that was all we had. I might be tempted to try 4 eggs to get the batter a bit thicker the next time. Your mileage may vary.)
Mix the flour and sugar together, and then add the milk and mix. Beat the eggs in a separate bowl before adding them to the dry mix. Mix thoroughly with a whisk.
Cook over medium heat in a skillet with a little butter. The batter is much thinner than American style batter and so it will spread out to cover the pan. When the edges start to dry, flip to the other side. The second side won’t take nearly as long as the first to cook.
The result is more crepe than cake, but delicious. Sprinkle a bit of sugar on the Pfannkuchen and roll up to eat. Or cover with your favorite fruit jelly, or syrup, or honey.
Guten morgen.
I’m not sure when the phrase “twenty-four by seven” entered the mainstream. Recently it has grown to become “twenty-four by seven by three-sixty-five.” Which I think is wrong.
Twenty-four by seven means twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Following the “hours per day, days per week” pattern, the next number given, three-sixty-five, should be weeks per something. Instead it’s days per year, a retreat.
The phrase should be “twenty-four by seven by fifty-two,” or “twenty-four by three-sixty-five.”
Living in the Midwest there is one sure sign of autumn’s arrival. No, it isn’t the fiery red of the leaves on the Maple trees. No, it isn’t the sudden appearance of pumpkins for sale in every parking lot around town. And it isn’t frost on the car windows in the mornings.
No, it’s the invasion of lady bugs into your house. It start innocuously enough with one or two on the screen of a window or sliding door. Then there are a few inside the house, maybe up by the ceiling, in a corner of the room, huddled together. Then one morning you come downstairs to find a dozens of the little beasts on the walls, floor, and furniture.
They are attracted to the warmth of your house and want to winter there. They release pheromones, which tell all the other lady bugs where to go. Being tiny little monsters, they are able to sneak through cracks and crevices not easily found or plugged. Once you’ve had them once, you’ll continue to get them; the pheromones don’t fade from year to year, washing the house to remove the pheromone trail is almost impossible.
Once in your house they don’t do anything but hibernate. unfortunately our homes are too dry in the winter for them to survive so most of them camped out inside will perish. If stressed they will release a tiny bit of blood (it’s yellow), which has a foul smell to scare away predators. The most expedient way to get rid of them is using a shop vac to hover them up and take them back outside.
There are two types of people in the world: those who wait until the car’s low fuel light has been on solidly for a few miles before getting gas, and those who fill up at half a tank. I’m firmly in the fuel light group.
Yesterday when I left work the miles to empty mode of my car’s trip computer read “138.” By the time I was home, some 24 miles later, it read “120.” I figured I could make another round trip to work at that rate.
This morning, however, I discovered that not all traffic is created equally. The stop-and-go build-up on I-35 clobbered my mileage. By the time I reached the parking garage the mileage to empty was a mere “76.” The contrast is amazing. The same trip, the same road, the same car, the same driver; two entirely different results. Yesterday afternoon I covered the 24 mile physical distance using only 18 miles of fuel. This morning I covered the same 24 mile distance using 44 miles of fuel.
Perhaps it really is uphill all the way to work.
Many years ago, when I worked in Vancouver Washington, I was introduced for the first time to the idea of naming servers. All servers have names, but the manufacturing client I worked at was the first place in my experience to use human readable names over something like “lkhmx18.” The development servers there were all rivers (Danube, Orinoco, Nile) while the production machines were stars or planets (Mars, Orion, et cetera).
Some of the places I have worked since then also used names for servers, some with a theme, others just willy-nilly. My computers have had names for a while now, mostly centered around the Winne-the-Pooh characters. My laptops are Eeyore and Tigger, while the iMac is HundredAcreWoods. The problem with Winne-the-Pooh inspired names is that you run out of names fairly quickly. I have been looking for a new theme for some time, one that would allow more latitude in naming.
Recently I have been watching the Lord of the Rings movies and special features. I’m also re-reading the novel. It occurred to me over the weekend that Tolkien’s masterpiece is filled with place names that would make good server or computer names too. Server towers could be named after any of the many towers in the story, while workstations or laptops could use place names. You could even use the names of the various characters for a good long time without running out new material.
With that in mind, I am thinking that the Mac OS X based machines are more elvish and the Windows boxes are dwarfish. The Linux based machines would then be wizards.
I have been a big fan of Google Mail, also known as GMail, ever since it was introduced. I was fortunate enough to snag an invitation early on in the beta cycles so I’ve been using it for over three years now. Recently I detailed how I am using GMail to aggregate all my mail accounts in to one umbrella account, and then how I use an IMAP account on my domain to access all my mail from multiple machines. The only thing that would improve my email configuration would be IMAP access to my GMail accounts.
Last week Google announced a roll-out of IMAP access to Google mail accounts. Labels in GMail will become folders in your IMAP client of choice, flagging items will add a star in GMail. You can even synchronize trash, sent, and drafts folders with some adjustments to your account settings.
Now I am eagerly awaiting the addition of IMAP to my primary GMail account. In a bit of irony, I just created a new GMail account last week so I could segregate a high-volume email list from my inbox. Tha new account was upgraded to IMAP almost as soon as the Google announcement was published. My primary account is still waiting that upgrade.
I feel like one of those impatient people waiting in an elevator lobby, repeatedly smacking the call button, secretly hoping that the elevator will come faster if it knows someone is in a hurry. I keep checking the settings page on my account hoping that Google will realize that I am ready and waiting to convert my access from a combination of POP3 and forwarding to IMAP all the way.
Time to go smack the call button again.
For the past month or so I’ve been reading three books concurrently. While we were in Germany we picked up a copy of Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth, an epic tale of building a cathedral in 12th century England. This has become the bathroom book, and we each read a few pages every visit.
My bedroom book, which gets read for a few minutes every evening before going to sleep has been Joseph Heywood’s The Berkut. I finished that story two nights ago, so last night I picked up Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien, to restart the Lord of The Rings again.
And during lunch I’ve been reading electronic books. Just before leaving for Europe I finished rereading Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, a wickedly good take on the Dracula story. Since returning I’ve completed John Katzenbach’s Hart’s War (far better than the movie), and I’ve started The Blue Nowhere, by Jeffery Deaver.
I’m enjoying each book, and I like having plenty to read. The only trouble is keeping straight what’s happened before when I sit down with a different book. Fortunately the story lines are all different enough to help keep them separated. There are very few Hobbits hacking in the blue nowhere, and very few hackers in 12th century England. I suppose there could be Hobbits in 12th century England, but so far that hasn’t been an issue.
A fascinating look at how the process of selection works behind the scenes to make predictive models work. The author uses Wikipedia, predictive markets, and Netflix’s recommendation system as examples of processes relying upon selection to work, producing results that are counter-intuitive.
He uses these examples as excellent analogies to evolution and makes the thesis that at least some of the resistance to the theory of evolution is a result of the hard to conceptualize process of selection.
Excellent.
Star Wars, er, Harry Potter.
This afternoon, after returning from a grocery shopping trip, we discovered that the power was out. A quick trip down the side walk confirmed that it wasn’t just us, the entire complex was in the dark. Knowing that others had likely already called, I wanted to call anyway, just so I would feel like I had done something about the situation.
Using the laptop and my wireless broadband card I was able to look up the number for Kansas City Power & Light. I called and entered our phone number only to have the automated system tell me that, “no account matched that phone number.” Then Sibylle reminded me that we don’t have KCP&L anymore, we have Weststar now.
She ran upstairs and got the last billing statement, which had the “report an outage” phone number listed. I called that number and entered our account number. The automated system told me that the outage had been recorded and that based on historical records, we could expect the power to be restored within 1 1/2 to 3 hours.
No sooner had I repeated this information to Sibylle than the lights came on again. The power of a phone call.