I've been recently reminded of a website that was making the rounds a few weeks ago, Cooking for Engineers. This site uses an intuitive (for engineers at least) method for displaying it's recipies. This makes understanding recipes a lot easier, as they quickly associate both ingredients and method of mixing or construction together. It's a pretty valuable resource. It's not quite perfect, as there are a few problems I still have with cooking.
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Units - How much flour is a cup of flour? How much tea can you fit in a teaspoon? Why use these bizarre units of measurement (which change from country to country), when the metric system works - no matter where you are in the universe. To overcome any unit problems, there are two useful sites - Google which has a conversion utility, and this site which has a whole bunch of conversion tips. I'd say the former is more useful, but the latter more comprehensive.
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Finding out what an ingredient is - I don't know what every ingredient in the world looks like. I don't know who to ask. Cooking for Engineers has some pictures of the larger ingredients, but I still have major problems with spices. Enter Gernot Katzer who runs a spice cataloguing page. This page provides pictures and detailed descriptions for each of the spices.
Of course, what is missing from the solutions from these two pages is a seamless way to tie them into the recipies. It's when looking like problems like this that I wish the Semantic Web was around already.
Afer playing around with my mobile for a little while, I've finally managed to figure out how to use Flickr to post pictures directly from the phone to blogspot. This is really useful, as the wedding is happening on the weekend. In an attempt to burn about $60 worth of phone credit I'll be posting pictures direct from the various bits and pieces that will be happening on Friday and Saturday. With any luck, I'll have enough battery life in the phone for me to be snapping away for the whole two days. You can view the photos at Bhautik and Briony's Wedding Blog
Talk Like A Pirate today
I look forward to being old and senile, it will let me get away with the following story - a bunch of random events which are related at best by their temporal proximity to each other. Tying these events together into a cohesive story is a challenge at best.
The story begins when I arrived at work on Friday morning, after being sick on Thursday, to see a large box sitting next to my desk. Given the recent round of redundancies that had occurred at work, I was fearing the worst. I exfoliated a sigh of relief when I looked around and saw the other boxes around everyone else's desks. If I was going down, at least the whole ship was going too. After a bit of random crying at my desk, I drew enough courage to go and ask someone when we were all going. It turns out the boxes were for the move down one floor. After mumbling something about cutting onions, I wiped away my tears and went to pack.
On this particular Friday, I didn't have a camera handy (more on that later) to take a picture of my desk, but it could be best described as random junk covered with a light sprinkling of papers. The process of packing the desk was a bit like staring at a Magic Eye picture, and hoping to sort of see some kind of order pop out at you. After about an hour of staring at the desk, scratching my head and generally looking perplexed, I decided the best way to maintain any order I had on my desk was to put the box under the desk, and just push everything into it.
Lunch was a free BBQ put on by the social committee at work, which I spent chatting to Nicole about the finer points of South American travel hygiene. After the lunch, everything was decidedly silly. People had already started moving their desks, so there was a lot of confusion, as we all muscled for desk positions near the windows. It turns out that the positions had already y been decided, but that didn't stop people from trying. I ended up spending the afternoon having "meetings" with various people around the company with my powers of concentration at an all time low.
After attempting to recover from my sickness on Thursday, I had decided not to go out on Friday night, but following much cajoling by Chris, I decided to go to the Sydney University Band Competition. Highlights of the evening were The Lyrical Madmen, The Alphabetics and The Crustaceans. The Lyrical Madmen were a bit of a crowd favourite, and I was a little disappointed they didn't win.
So where exactly is this story heading to? And what does it have to do with this man. Well, there happened to be a lucky door prize for the Band competition that night - where they were giving away mobile phones. For the first time since high school (where I had won tickets to a Sydney Kings game) - I actually managed to win a competition. Winning the phone was quite a good turn of fortune, and turned me into a giggling idiot for the rest of the evening.
The phone I won was a Three pre-paid mobile plan with the NEC e-616v handset. It's quite a nifty little device. Unfortunately, the pre-paid plans don't include the generic GPRS access, and the Bluetooth functionality is a bit crippled. Luckily, there are smart people on the intarweb who have whipped up a nice little utility that allows for file transfer between the phone and the Mac. I've got $75 worth of credit to use on this phone, so I'm going to be going a bit crazy with the mobile emailing.
After picking up the phone from Marrickville earlier today, I played around with the phone for a bit trying to figure out how to do complicated things such as making phone calls and trying to pick a ring tone which didn't suggest I was 13 and enchanted by shiny things (only the latter is true). On the way back from Macquarie Centre after picking up a coffee machine for my brother and my soon to be bhabi, I managed to get to my driveway before the hail came down on me with a vengeance. By this point of time, I had figured out how to take pictures with my phone - so what better way to test out the phone, than by taking pictures of the hail. I think I'm going to have to set up an account with Flickr (a la Ben) to have a go at that latest trend on the trendy-web, Moblogging.